IE SENSE OF 
UN & PLEASURE 



HENRY T.MOORE 




Class 

Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



Our Senses Series — George Van N. Dearborn, Editor 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



BY 

HENRY THOMAS MOORE, Ph.D 

H 

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Dartmouth College 




NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
1917 



Copyright, 1917, by 
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 



Published August, 1917 



V 

SEP -4 I9t7 



©CI.A473295 



TO 

M. B. M. 



PREFACE 

In presenting to the public a volume on pain 
and pleasure as part of a series on the senses, a 
word of explanation is perhaps necessary as to the 
precise meaning attached to these terms- It may 
quite properly be asked how far I mean to identify 
these terms with sensation, and how far with 
feeling. Indeed, my whole position in regard to 
the relation of sensation and feeling naturally 
comes in question when unpleasantness is included 
as a variety of pain, and the sensation of tickling 
is put in the same general class with pleasantness* 
There is probably no more disputed ground in 
psychology than that which relates to the above 
point, and none in which more different shades of 
opinion have authoritative support. Speaking 
personally, I find it impossible to dispute the fact 
of a distinct difference between the sensation of 
pain and the feeling of unpleasantness, but the 
points of similarity seem far more significant than 
the points of difference. We may therefore with- 
out hesitation class them under a single general 



PREFACE 

heading even though recognizing them as sub- 
classes of a primitive type of consciousness. The 
right understanding of this relation will, I be- 
lieve, come as the result of a genetic study rather 
than of cross-section analysis. [The effort has 
been in the third chapter to suggest a probable 
line of genetic continuity from primitive pleasant- 
ness and unpleasantness to full-fledged sensory 
pleasure and pain. 

Especial emphasis has been laid throughout on 
the broad, vital significance which all pain and 
pleasure experiences have in common. It is be- 
lieved that a satisfactory philosophy of the prob- 
lem of evil can proceed only from a psychology of 
pain and pleasure that lends itself to broad inter- 
pretation. 

I wish here to acknowledge my especial in- 
debtedness to Professor G. V. N. Dearborn for 
his kind loan of two hitherto unpublished hem- 
obarograms showing the relation of pleasantness 
and unpleasantness to blood-pressure. These 
graphs appear in Chapter V. 

Hanover, New Hampshire, 
March 16, 19 17. 



EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 

Few people, comparatively, however intelligent 
and generally thoughtful, have as yet stopped to 
consider the surpassing interest and the unique 
importance of Our Senses. Living gateways as 
the sense organs are between ourselves and our 
ever-changing surroundings, both spiritual and 
material, they constitute the channels not only of 
our life-satisfaction, but of all our immediate 
knowledge as well. If, then, in discussing them, 
biological imagination and breadth and depth go 
hand in hand with technical knowledge of the 
highest grade, the volumes comprised should be 
both human and scientific. And these volumes 
are so, and will be. It is because of such possibil- 
ities that a series like the present, authentic yet 
interesting and inexpensive, must appeal to the 
intelligent man or woman of to-day. As contribu- 
tions to psychology and to education their value is 
certain to be great, as indeed is indicated by the 

vii 



viii EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 

list of their authors, whom it would be superflu- 
ous to praise or even to portray. 

Small in number are the topics in all the won- 
drous range of the science of living things that 
are more alluring for their very mystery and 
romance than these same gateways by which we 
may go out into " our world " and by which this 
same great world may come into us and, for the 
little span of life, lend us a feeling of home-dwell- 
ing. 

Within the past decade there has been a gen- 
eral popular awakening from the former uninter- 
ested attitude toward these phenomena of the 
physical and mental processes by which we keep 
in touch with the things outside ourselves. A fair 
knowledge of the rudiments of biology, of physi- 
ology, and of psychology now has become part of 
the curriculum of our schools and colleges. And 
of these three sciences it is psychology which has 
entered so deeply into our everyday life — busi- 
ness life as well as personal — that at last no one 
can escape its influence. And no one wishes to, 
for psychology in a sense has become the intel- 
lectual handmaiden of all who think in terms of to- 
day, with to-day's amazing development of insight 



EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION ix 

into the mortal meanings of our very selves, body 
always as well as soul. Our scientific realization 
of our true continuity with all things else goes 
on apace, and our personal relations to the bound- 
less, perhaps Infinite, Cosmos of consciousness, 
life, and energy seem ever clearer. Thus, in a 
way, the sense organs give us personal anchorage 
in a Sea which else sometimes, from its very im- 
mensity and stress, would overwhelm us. Our 
range, although the broadest as yet vouchsafed to 
life, is as it were but a mere line out into the com- 
plexity of the Actual. The first step to the appre- 
ciation of this complexity and its implications for 
the human mind is knowledge of the conditions 
of its acquirement, — of the sense organs and of 
the perplexing brain behind them. 

Editorial duty or privilege fails to know much 
as yet of the detailed contents of these several 
volumes. But the editor does know not a little 
about the arrangers and expounders of the vol- 
umes' contents, and he knows that they are women 
and men of conspicuous sense — trustworthy in 
every sense. The books are the best of their kind 
and are in a class by themselves. They are the 
standard authority for ordinary use. These vol- 



x EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 

umes when disposed as a red-backed set on one's 
library shelf will be a set of books to be proud of. 
And the high-school boys and girls and their 
fathers evenings and on Sundays and their 
mothers at the club all alike will think of them as 
highly valued friends, both wise and agreeable, as 
pleasant to meet for an hour as the most welcome 
visitor well could be. No higher " authority " 
exists than that which these authors represent; 
and it would be hard to find those who could set 
forth " authority " more gracefully. Each knows 
that literary enjoyment usually goes hand in hand 
with that wisdom which extended is the director 
of Life itself. 

Of the many moot-points in the sister sciences 
of psychology and physiology, none probably is 
more mootable than the technical truth about pleas- 
ure and pain, pleasantness and unpleasantness. 
The psychologists (both amateur and professional, 
lawyers and salesmen as well as professors of 
psychology in the colleges) have inevitably a great 
interest in the subject of this volume, that double 
interest coming both from the very nature of a 
mystery, and from the circumstance that pleasure 



EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION xi 

and pain are at the very heart of every one, even 
of the narrowest and coldest intellectualist or 
algebraist. The psychologist then is both scien- 
tifically and humanly interested, and bound to be 
so always, in this theme, so that each new treatise 
on the subject will have a ready welcome. 

On the other hand, who will suggest a subject 
in which the traditional unpsychologic " average " 
man (the term average never applies to a 
woman!) would be more interested, if he stopped 
just one moment to think of it, than in this two- 
phased subject of pleasure and pain? Does he 
not spend much of his time and money and pre- 
cious nerve-strength exhausting his longing for 
pleasure? and surely more minutes every day than 
he would care to publish the number of, studying 
the avoidance of pain? And pleasantness keeps 
him living oftentimes; and unpleasantness con- 
tinually reminds him that Earth not yet is heaven 
but full of worries and bothers, and sordid some- 
times with petty disagreeableness, — even if too 
petty to properly burden a human soul. This 
book explains some of these feelings. 

To every man interested in the undying prob- 
lem of Job (the origin and need of evil in our 



xii EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 

brief paradise) pain must have always a special 
interest And to the moral philosophers, ama- 
teur and professional, both pleasure and pain. 

Pleasure and pain in a way underlie the other 
topics set forth in the volumes of this Series, be- 
cause every sensation is at least potentially either 
pleasant or the contrary. The editor personally 
leans to the opinion that the balance of evidence 
favors the view that pleasure and pain are two 
sensations and as distinct from others as are taste 
or hearing. From this way of " seeing " them 
(even seemly language is confusing sometimes), 
the larger number of common feeling-experiences 
are not properly painful or pleasurable at all, but 
rather are unpleasant or pleasant. But the terms 
pleasure and pain are used in common speech to 
include all four of these ideas. And after all, 
there is one broad, common-sense criterion be- 
neath and at the same time above all such nice 
distinctions: A certain quality of sensation we 
all wish to continue or to return; and a certain 
other quality to cease and never to return. For 
the broker and the housewife, the soldier and the 
machinist and the farmer and their children and 
their sisters, this basal contrast after all is the 



EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION xiii 

main means of judging this whole matter. But, 
none the less, it is not easy to doubt (until con- 
vinced of error?) that when the microscope-men, 
have taken up the problem of the general body- 
sense-organs with a subtlety of method at all ad- 
equate to the search, a relatively short time will 
give us the organic sense organs of pleasure and 
of pain, and probably the respective nerves 
thereof. With this identification to use, in turn it 
will not be long, perhaps, before the technical un- 
certainty is solved as to whether or not they really 
are sensations ! 

What our present author has done in this vol- 
ume the editor thinks he has accomplished with 
remarkably good judgment; and with a technical 
descriptive skill which the literary critic, as well as 
the psychologist, must admire. It surely is one 
more demonstration that a book may be of a high 
scientific standard and yet of ready and permanent 
interest to the educated million for whom, after 
all, science ultimately exists. Sometimes the 
" seeker " who can write only for his colleagues 
possessing the same edition of a dictionary, for- 
gets this, the " final purpose " of science. 

The volume is free from theorizing to an un- 



xiv EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 

usual degree; it simply states and states simply 
much of what its author knows about his subject. 
And really, a psychologist who refrains from 
theoretic discussion in this particular realm of 
feeling is a being of strong personal restraint. 
For a relatively brief book, the volume says much 
and that scientifically and popularly well. 

Professor Moore has emphasized anew the im- 
portant thesis that in a sense and a degree, human 
struggle is the index of pleasure and of pain, using 
the terms in their broader meanings. [This view- 
point not only lets us understand the reason for 
their bodily evolution as the chief motives of be- 
havior, but it places them in the long scale of 
moral, that is, permanent, values. 

Scarcely any topic in psychology is more hu- 
manly interesting in its history than the published 
opinion concerning pleasure and pain and the 
other experiences of which these words are sym- 
bols, but our author, with a full realization of this 
human interest, by the plan of this Series has been 
compelled to omit this the historical phase of his 
subject. 

But just now it is enough that it is a compre- 
hensive account clearly and yet scientifically ex- 



EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION xv 

pressed of a topic of surpassing interest to every 
conscious being — the latest word on pleasure and 
pain, and a word that is full of meaning and feel- 
ing for us all. 

G. V. N. D. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
April, 19 1 7. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Varieties of Pain i 

II Varieties of Pleasure . . .16 

III Probable Origin and Develop- 

ment of Pain and Pleasure . 33 

IV The Meaning of Pain and Pleas- 

ure 53 

V The Bodily Effects of Pain and 

Pleasure . 76 

VI The Nervous Basis of Pain and 

Pleasure . 96 

VII The Diagnostic Value of Pain . 117 

VIII ^Esthetic Pleasure . . . .134 

IX Pleasure in Play 146 

X The Paradox of Pleasure Seek- 
ing ........ 152 

XI Conclusion 164 

Bibliography 167 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Fig. I. Amoeba chasing and attempting 

to ingest an euglena . . .36 

Fig. 2. Positive reaction of paramecium 

to pleasant contact ... 37 

Fig. 3. Reactions of paramoecia to heat 

and cold 39 

Fig. 4. Laughing chimpanzee {half tone 

facing) 48 

Fig. 5, A. Hemobarogram 89 

Fig. 5, B. Hemobarogram 90 

Figs. 6, 7. The nervous system . ... 98 

Fig. 8. The ascending and descending 

tracts between cord and cortex 100 

Fig. 9. The middle and lower brain . .102 

Fig. 10. Cross section of skin . . . .110 

Fig. 11. Nerve endings 112 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 

CHAPTER I 

Varieties of Pain 

When a speaker uses the word " pain " or " pleas- 
ure/' it is probable that his hearers feel that they 
have a fairly adequate notion of what he means. 
And yet it needs but little reflection to convince 
one's self that these words, as commonly used, 
include a much wider variety of mental experience 
than do any of the other words that describe par- 
ticular sensations. The sense of hearing at once 
suggests to me something that is either tone or 
noise; the sense of vision something that either 
has color or is lacking in color. But " pain " is 
not so easy to limit strictly to a special group of 
facts. It may refer to something so trivial as 
pricking a finger, or it may mean something of 
such far-reaching importance as grief at the death 
of a beloved friend. The fact that these two 



2 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

widely different experiences may both be appro- 
priately described as painful, suggests to us that 
somehow pain is more deeply imbedded in the 
fundamental conditions of our existence than are 
hearing, vision, taste, or smell. For this reason, 
a satisfactory understanding of the " sense of 
pain " can come only from an adequate array of 
concrete instances of painfulness, — both those in- 
stances where pain seems to be a simple sensa- 
tion, and those in which it involves our emotions 
and higher thought processes. 

Surface Pain 

There is, to begin with, a very large and 
familiar list of pains which result from injury at 
or near the surface of the body. Whether we 
step barefooted on a tack, or pick up the wrong 
end of a hot poker, or tear a finger-nail at the 
quick, or offer a sensitive tooth to the tender 
mercies of an aggressive dentist, we are certain to 
be rewarded in any of these cases by a very defi- 
nite kind of sensation quality. It appears to us 
as something very bright and sharp-edged; it is 
so insistent that it forces us to pay attention, and 
so disagreeable that our natural impulse is to make 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 3 

very definite and energetic movements of with- 
drawal. 

Taken as a class, these pains are distinguished 
from all others by their extreme pointedness and 
by their definiteness in consciousness. [They give 
us exact information to the effect that, as far as 
we are personally concerned, something is radi- 
cally wrong in the world outside, — something 
w r hich we can hardly afford to leave out of account. 
As if to safeguard their function of imminent 
warning, they ordinarily refuse to disappear com- 
pletely from consciousness until the source of dis- 
turbance has been removed. In this respect they 
differ notably from all other forms of sense ex- 
perience. For example, few sensations of smell 
can last continuously for more than two minutes; 
even the strong odor of asafetida is exhausted 
in one and a half minutes, and the strongest cheese 
smells are likely to become odorless after eight 
minutes. The sense of touch is so easy to get 
accustomed to that the absent-minded person not 
infrequently finds himself looking all over the 
house for the spectacles on his nose or even for 
the hat on his head. 

But the acute sense of pain described above is 



4 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

not easily cheated out of its hold on our attention. 
The dentist's buzzer is more and more carefully 
scrutinized after each new insertion into the open 
tooth, and the throbbing of the injured finger be- 
comes more and more unendurable until healing 
actually begins to set in. 

Bodily Distress 

Quite different in many respects from the pains 
announcing harmful contact with the outer world 
are those which serve to indicate that the inner 
working of the body is not proceeding success- 
fully. To appreciate this difference one has only 
to contrast a splitting headache with a pricked 
finger, a cramp in the stomach with a scalded foot, 
or a twinge from about the region of the heart 
with the smarting from a razor cut on the face. 

One especially curious fact about this second 
class of pains is that they originate in organs 
which can scarcely be made to give pain as the 
result of injury inflicted by ordinary external 
means. It is always necessary that the organ be 
thwarted in its normal function by some condition 
developed from within the body, such as inflam- 
mation, disease, new; growths, etc. Surgeons 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 5 

have repeatedly assured themselves that no 
amount of mechanical insult to the stomach or in- 
testine, after the peritoneum has been opened, will 
provoke any outcry from the patient. From the 
day when Xenophon in the " Anabasis " wrote of 
Nakarchos, the Arcadian, " wounded in the ab- 
domen in battle, and coming in flight, holding his 
entrails in his hands," evidence has continued to 
accumulate to the effect that the intestine can be 
cut, pinched, rubbed with gauze, seized with a 
clamp, or pricked with a needle, — all without the 
faintest indication of pain. The writer has re- 
cently learned from an ambulance driver in the 
French hospital service in the present European 
war of a case in which a French sergeant, shot 
through the chest to the right of the heart, and 
exit near the spine, said that he felt merely a sort 
of burning, and this in spite of the fact that he 
spat blood for several days, and had many clots 
removed. And yet nothing is more certain than 
that an ulcer in the stomach produces spontaneous 
pain as well as extreme tenderness to pressure. 
And the lump-like pains that go with a colicky 
digestion are the despair of the sufferer as well 
as a joy to the agent for dyspepsia tablets. 



6 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

The facts just cited in regard to the stomach 
and intestine are paralleled in other inner organs. 
[The brain surface has of late been freely explored 
with surgical instruments and with weak electrical 
stimuli, always without pain being reported by the 
subject under operation. Nevertheless the brain 
seems to be extremely sensitive to its own changes 
in volume, or to any abnormal internal conditions, 
such as cerebral abscesses, which make for an in- 
crease in intracranial pressure. An equally good 
illustration is to be found in the case of the blood 
vessels. They seem to be immune from pain pro- 
duced by any ordinary external means, but when 
their normal function of distributing the blood is 
seriously thwarted, they give rise to excruciating 
pain. One experimenter, working with dogs, 
found that a binding of the vessels caused extreme 
discomfort; and it is without question that the 
suffocating contractions in angina pectoris a<re to 
be reckoned among the severest pains. 

From the foregoing, it is clearly evident that 
the ordinary method of arousing inner pains is 
radically different from that of stimulating sur- 
face pains. The more outward lying parts of the 
body, such as the skin, muscles, tendons and joints, 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 7 

which afford us a means of intelligent understand- 
ing of the outer environment, are necessarily more 
sensitive to that environment. 

In respect to quality of sensation the inner 
pains are again strikingly different from the outer. 
Without exception, they are heavier, duller, and 
give us a less exact clue as to the location of the 
trouble. When one tries to describe them, he at 
once finds himself very indefinite both in his choice 
of adjectives and in selecting the exact spot from 
which the pain seems to originate. Such expres- 
sions as " a feeling that something is wrong in- 
side " or " a feeling as if something were about to 
give way " form a considerable part of our vo- 
cabulary describing abdominal disorders. A 
number of ignorant soldiers, when asked to point 
to the part of the body most concerned with the 
pangs of hunger, gave the most conflicting re- 
sponses. Several pointed to the neck and upper 
chest; only two indicated the stomach, and four 
were unwilling to admit that it came from any 
particular region. Indeed, so lacking in definite- 
ness is this class of pains, that they as often as not 
give a false account of themselves by affecting 
other nervous connections. Thus some abdominal 



8 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

diseases cause a shoulder pain, and angina pectoris 
may very definitely affect the arm or neck. In 
short, the well defined areas of the outer surface 
of the body, when indirectly aroused by pain from 
within the body, succeed in impressing their own 
local character at the expense of the vaguer inner 
disturbance by which they are aroused. 

The same lack of definiteness is seen in the way 
we react to inner discomfort. Whereas the in- 
jured hand is promptly and effectively removed 
from the occasion of injury, the aching stomach 
succeeds in producing for the most part only help- 
less writhing and groaning. To be sure we do 
learn a few simple devices for keeping the pain 
as endurable as possible. We may find that ly- 
ing on the stomach gives a position of maximum 
relief, or in the case of headache, we may discover 
that bending the head backward or bathing it in 
cold water is efficacious, but for the most part our 
behavior resembles that of an organism very 
poorly equipped in resources for self-protection. 
We seem to descend a long step in the scale of in- 
telligence every time we make the transition from 
the exactly coordinated impulses by which the skin 
defends itself, to the blind protests of diseased 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 9 

inner organs. For this reason we are justified in 
using the term " distress " to characterize this 
class of pains as distinct from the exact pains of 
the first class, which we may hereafter refer to as 
" pain." 

Unpleasantness 

A person of robust health may go practically 
from one day's end to another without any thought 
of what is taking place within his body; and mod- 
ern conveniences and safety first philosophy are 
gradually eliminating the occasion for scratches, 
cuts, and burns, so that it might be possible to look 
forward in time to an era of painless life, if it 
were not for the existence of a third type of pain- 
ful situation, which comprises decidedly the major 
fraction of the ills to which flesh is heir, — the un- 
pleasant. 

By contrast with surface pain, unpleasantness is 
even more than bodily distress lacking in any clear 
and direct outline which makes it possible to set 
it apart and think of it separately from the total 
situation in which it occurs. It is this marked lack 
of clearness which has convinced the greater num- 
ber of psychologists that unpleasantness and pleas- 



io PAIN AND PLEASURE 

antness are unique mental experiences to be con- 
sidered apart from any other kind of mental con- 
tent " Unpleasantness is a feeling," they say, 
" pain a sensation." [There is weighty authority 
both for and against this statement, and the con- 
troversy can hardly be said to be completely 
closed. It matters not for our present purpose 
whether the statement be confirmed or denied. 
What all are agreed on is that the resemblances 
of pain and unpleasantness are as significant as 
their differences, and that the ultimate explanation 
of one is probably also the explanation of the 
other; hence the inadequacy of any account of one 
that omits parallel reference to the other. 

Owing to the very fact of its indistinctness, un- 
pleasantness seems to take on the special character 
of everything with which it is associated. Xhe 
taste of quinine is like the discomfort at having 
made a social blunder, in that both are unpleasant, 
but the unpleasantness has so lost its identity that 
it is hard to disentangle it from the taste sensation 
in the one case and from the complicated social 
emotions in the other. The result is that the 
number of unpleasantnesses is as great as the num- 
ber of possible variations in our mental life. We 



PAIN AND PLEASURE it 

probably come nearest to recognizing unpleasant- 
ness as such, when something pleasant is allowed 
to become unpleasant by being continued too long 
or by being made too intense. If the pleasing 
warmth of a bath is gradually transformed to an 
excessive heat, it is almost possible to catch the 
unpleasantness coming in and taking the place of 
the pleasantness. To be sure it is like trying to 
turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the 
darkness looks, but one at least gets the hint of 
something almost at hand, even though he can't 
quite imprison it and look it in the face. Again, 
when any commonplace pleasure, too long drawn 
out, gradually produces boredom, one is fairly 
conscious that his ennui has supervened on a situa- 
tion otherwise unchanged, and he at least infers 
the separateness of his unpleasant feeling. We 
are also fairly able to form an indirect notion of 
what the disagreeable qualities of simple sensa- 
tions are in themselves. When one smells a foul 
odor, or touches something clammy, or listens to 
a high grating noise, he experiences unpleasant- 
ness in a fairly accessible form. A little harder 
to disentangle is the same effect when we look at 
a combination of colors that " swear at each 



12 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

other," or hear an orchestra playing badly out of 
tune. But the unpleasantness of being unable to 
collect one's thoughts, or discovering that a trusted 
friend has proved disloyal, is almost inextricably 
woven in with the complex situation of which it is 
a part. 

Long education in the great variety of unpleas- 
ant mental states has endowed man with a count- 
less number of different gestures and facial ex- 
pressions indicating dislike and avoidance, but 
these specially learned reactions ought not to blind 
us to the essential fact that unpleasantness as such 
is an obscure and unintelligent state of mind. 
While it lasts, it only serves to lessen activity and 
to turn us in on ourselves. A primitive organism 
submitted for a time to disagreeable treatment, 
tends more and more to shrink within itself; if 
badly frightened, it may even curl up and " feign 
death." A human being, if his consciousness is 
sufficiently taken up with the same kind of feeling, 
behaves in a very similar manner. Sickening 
dread and paralyzing fear are synonymous with 
an almost complete cessation of effective bodily 
response. Shame, sorrow, and all the rest of the 
emotions of marked unpleasant tone, present some- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 13 

what the same picture of a person given over 
temporarily to the organic and vegetative side of 
his life, and distinguished for a cessation of any- 
thing like intelligent behavior. This is best seen 
in the case of those types of insanity in which 
melancholic and dreadful thoughts predominate. 
These unfortunate persons seem deprived of every 
resource except that of huddling up in as small a 
heap as possible. If a violently disagreeable sen- 
sation is one for which a person has not already 
formed effective habits, the result is likely to be 
a complete giving up of the ghost, and an other- 
wise intelligent person may become reduced to a 
mere quivering lump of unhappiness. It is re- 
ported that recently on one of the trans-Atlantic 
passenger liners, when a submarine was spied ap- 
proaching for a torpedo attack, some of the sea- 
sick passengers refused to have any interest in the 
threatened danger, and would not take the most 
elementary measures of precaution. It is not by 
accident that pessimism is associated with ineffi- 
ciency. A life given over permanently to unpleas- 
antness is a life doomed to a shut-in existence and 
lowered vitality. The current saying that the 
world does not need knockers but boosters, is a 



i 4 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

popular expression of the fundamental fact that 
unpleasantness, even more than bodily distress, is 
a state of mental emptiness. 

What has just been said does not stand in con- 
tradiction to the well-known fact that the after- 
effects of unpleasant experiences are of far-reach- 
ing consequence in modifying our behavior. If 
the burnt child did not dread the fire, and the 
young chick which had pecked a bad-tasting cat- 
erpillar did not avoid a repetition of the occur- 
rence, there would be no possibility of progress 
toward the selection of the agreeable. But the 
learning that comes as an intelligent working-over 
of unpleasant experiences does not gainsay the 
blindness of the unpleasant reaction itself. 

Summary 

Our review of painfulness has brought to at- 
tention three fairly distinct types. The first type, 
surface pain, is distinguished by sharp clearness, 
exactness of location, and well-coordinated reac- 
tion. The second type, bodily distress, is char- 
acterized by obscure dullness, difficulty of exact 
location, and a quite general and somewhat aim- 
less bodily reaction. The third type, unpleasant- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 15 

ness, is marked by such obscurity that it is com- 
monly spoken of as feeling; it has no particular 
location, but seems to pervade the whole body; 
and its corresponding bodily reaction, with the ex- 
ception of a few special habits learned or instinc- 
tively provided, is one marked by an indefinite 
shrinking, involving pretty much the whole body. 



CHAPTER II 

.Varieties oe Pleasure 

Surface Pleasure, or Tickling 

Every healthy child likes to be tickled. A 
friendly attack with a straw or feather on the 
soles of the feet, or a brisk use of the fingers up 
and down the ribs or under the armpits ordinarily 
provokes screams of laughter in any youngster. 
When in the midst of his paroxysms he may cry 
out to his assailant to stop tickling, but when he has 
been released, he will usually beg to have the fun 
begin again. The immediate pleasurableness of 
this kind of diversion may be judged by the fact 
that any pronounced tickle zone is often referred 
to by young children as the " funny place." In 
general it can be said that this pleasure sensation, 
which differs so strikingly from the surface pain 
described in the first chapter, is provoked by 
stimuli too weak to do any real harm, but just 
strong enough to faintly suggest injury without 

16 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 17 

actually bringing it about. Whereas pain results 
when the skin is injured or pricked, pleasure re- 
sults when it is faintly threatened but left intact. 
As soon as the contact with the skin becomes so 
broad or solid as to be recognized with certainty, 
one no longer feels any tickling or tendency to 
laugh, for the threat no longer exists. One has 
instead the definite and familiar feeling of a harm- 
less object. For this reason we cannot easily 
tickle ourselves with our own hands; their touch 
is too well-known to us; we may succeed with a 
feather or with something only weakly recogniz- 
able, but the same feather is far more effective if 
manipulated by the hand of another person. 

It is for this reason also that the change to a 
mood of sullenness in a person being tickled will 
suddenly render him immune from the effects of 
what, a moment ago, convulsed him with laugh- 
ter. Just as an angry person refuses to let him- 
self be terrified by danger threatened by one who 
has offended him, so he fails to feel any ticklish- 
ness in the playful threatening of his skin by one 
whom he dislikes. The skin of a person made 
unafraid through hostile emotion seems to acquire 
a certain invulnerability which takes account only 



1 8 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

of pressure contacts. It is little concerned with 
either actual or possible injuries. 

Once again, the pleasure sensation which, if 
made too familiar, so readily goes over into in- 
different pressure, may just as easily be changed 
into a kind of painfulness if made completely un- 
familiar, or if brought about under conditions 
where self-defense is made impossible. Thus if 
a ticklish youngster is taken completely unawares 
by a string slyly drawn across the back of his neck, 
or if his dangling bare foot unexpectedly finds its 
way into contact with the gently quivering point 
of a wisp of straw, his withdrawal is made with 
almost the same promptness as if he had been 
pricked with a pin. And the light crawling of a 
beetle which has found its way underneath his 
shirt, may provoke the laughter of bystanders, but 
their amusement is far from meeting with a sym- 
pathetic response in him, unhappily occupied as 
he is. We see then that a very slight change of 
conditions one way or the other may convert the 
" funny feeling " of tickling into mere touch or 
into unpleasantness. Indeed there are some parts 
of the body where the best that tickling can do is 
to cause pressure; others where it can't be made 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 19 

other than disagreeable. For most people the 
extreme tips of the fingers are free from ticklish- 
ness. Xhey are so educated in the interpretation 
of contacts that it is impossible to mystify them. 
The minutest variation in the form of anything 
touched has a very definite meaning for them; 
hence it is impossible to create for them a situation 
full of vague possibilities. For most people, 
again, the inside of the ear and of the nostrils 
gives only disagreeableness in response to tickling. 
It is almost as it were against the rules of the game 
to attack via the nose and ear. At any rate the 
threat to injure inner passages of the body hardly 
admits of playful interpretation. Generally 
speaking, however, the most vulnerable parts of 
the body are the most ticklish. Hall and Allin, 
on the basis of a considerable amount of data, 
have concluded that the order of ticklishness for 
the various parts of the body is as follows : soles 
of the feet, under the arms, neck and throat, 
ribs, back, under the chin, stomach, knees, etc. 
The least ticklish parts were the shoulder-blades, 
shoulders, calves and thighs of the leg. It 
appears at once that the first list contains those 
parts which exhibit the greatest vulnerability and 



20 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

suggestiveness of danger, whereas the parts named 
in the second list are marked by a certain ox-like 
invulnerability and obtuseness. 

The ticklishness of individuals shows the same 
relation to sensitiveness and presumably to vulner- 
ability. This sensitiveness may be raised to such 
a pitch in high strung children that an explosion of 
laughter will result from the slightest provocation. 
Hall and Allin mention cases of children so ticklish 
that they scream with laughter if merely touched; 
one child writhes and screams if a friend makes a 
buzzing sound; another feels ticklish and must 
giggle in going down an elevator ; and still a third 
needs only to be pointed at to feel tickled. 

As often as not, tickle is referred to as a weak 
sensation of pressure. The " funny feeling " 
itself, however, almost beggars description. [The 
most characteristic feature, perhaps, is the feeling 
of strain giving way to a burst of excess energy. 
If the strain is sufficiently great and the explosion 
correspondingly tremendous, we speak of it as 
being " killingly " funny. Although much more 
difficult to place than surface pain, the funniness 
does seem to begin either in the part tickled, or in 
some general region such as the stomach, throat 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 21 

or face, and then to diffuse itself rapidly over the 
entire body. 

It was noted in the preceding chapter that the 
bodily reaction to surface pain was a very exact 
and calculable affair. Sticking one thousand boys 
with a pin would lead to the discovery of very few 
variations in the boyish mode of response to pin- 
sticking. With tickling the case is wholly other- 
wise. From the youthful stoic whom nothing can 
induce to smile, to the little hysteric who howls in 
an agony of glee at the mere crooking of a finger, 
the number of individual variations is legion. 
More often than not, the first indications are given 
by a brightness or twinkling of the eye; but in 
many cases a sudden dimpling of the cheeks or 
slight twitching of the corners of the mouth may 
be the first visible sign that the tickling has been 
accepted as funny. Even before the snorts of 
laughter have set in, some form of defensive 
movement has usually been brought about. 
Those movements are described by Sully as 
follows: " retraction of the foot and leg when the 
sole is tickled; the bending of the head to the 
shoulder when the neck is tickled; the rendering 
of the body concave on the side which is attacked; 



22 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

the thrusting away of the hand of the tickler; 
wriggling and fencing with the arms when a child 
is tickled lying on his back." While these move- 
ments are never exactly reproduced in any two 
individuals, it is in the final expression of laughter 
that the greatest variation is to be found. One 
finds facial distortion in infinite variety, vocal out- 
bursts that run all the way from soft gurgling to 
cackling peals, and individual rhythms varying 
from a quite gradual to an instantaneous onset. 
Evidently the tickling reaction has not yet become 
a stereotyped part of the behavior of the race. 
By contrast with pain, it seems decidedly an unfixed 
and individual feature of human behavior equip- 
ment. 

Gratification, or Pleasure of the Inner Organs 

No one organ in our bodies carries with it as 
much possibility of pleasure as of pain, but there 
is unmistakable evidence that every organ, when 
adequately functioning, contributes its share to the 
total background of pleasure, which inspires the 
healthy man to remark, " It seems good to be 
alive." 

It is naturally to be expected that organic satis- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 23 

faction will be the keener in proportion as the 
organ's function is of supreme importance for the 
life of the individual and of the race. When the 
painful contractions of an empty stomach are 
replaced by the mild tension resulting from a com- 
fortably large meal, this restoration of an indis- 
pensable condition of life is heralded by one of the 
most all-pervading pleasures that the vegetative 
side of our life knows, — the pleasure of satiety. 
It is almost as though the man's soul had tempor- 
arily taken up its abode in his belly, and w r ere 
announcing from there its satisfaction at the way 
things were proceeding. Civilized man, with an 
abundance of food, has in a measure developed a 
fine scorn for one who eats with conviction; but 
among savages and young children, with whom 
the food question is perpetually at hand, one often 
finds that the recognized sign of pleasure is some 
expression which indicates the taking-in of food. 
Travelers have reported that the negroes on the 
Upper Nile display their admiration for beads by 
rubbing their bellies, and that Greenlanders, when 
they wish to show their pleasure, suck down air 
as if swallowing food. 

As one could live even less without water than 



24 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

without food, the grateful effect of quenching 
thirst is correspondingly more acute, and the 
occasions are likewise much more infrequent when 
the need is urgently felt. The satisfaction seems 
to be most definitely localized about the soft 
palate; indeed one may for a time cheat himself 
by merely moistening his parched throat, but the 
complete act of swallowing is necessary to get the 
full course of satisfaction which normally trails 
after the liquid. One would have to imagine him- 
self traveling by caravan or in company with the 
Ancient Mariner to picture even faintly the 
hilarious ecstasy which probably accompanies the 
slaking of real thirst. The pathological craving 
of the dipsomaniac, although a morbid state, offers 
the most frequently observed illustration of the 
intensity to which the thirst impulse and the corre- 
sponding pleasure of its satisfaction may con-> 
ceivably attain. Professor James cites the follow- 
ing case from Cincinnati, Ohio: " A few years 
ago a tippler was put into an almshouse in this 
state. Within a few days he had devised various 
expedients to procure rum, but failed. At length, 
however, he hit upon one which was successful. 
He went into the wood-yard of the establishment, 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 25 

placed one hand upon the block, aad with an axe 
in the other, struck it off with a single blow. 
With the stump raised and streamings he ran into 
the house and cried, ' Get some rum ! My hand 
is off ! ' In the confusion and bustle of the occa- 
sion, a bowl of rum was brought, into which he 
plunged the bleeding member of his body, then, 
raising the bowl to his mouth, drank freely and 
exultingly exclaimed, * Now I am satisfied! ' " 

The following statement from a French sol- 
dier * in the present war parallels in normal life 
the above pathological case. It is quoted from an 
account of trench life given by a- wounded private : 
11 In the north, it is often hard to get water. I 
have seen soldiers go without water for 48 hours. 
Some were wounded, and very thirsty. They 
tried to drink the filthy water in the trenches. An 
officer stood over them. i If you drink that water 
I'll shoot you dead!' * Shoot me if you like, 
officer,' said the soldier, 4 but I must drink.' And 
he did. 

The pleasure derived from the free circulation 
of the blood and from breathing without difficulty 

1 From unpublished notes of O. H. Moore on " Relief Work in 
France." 



26 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

is something to which we get so adapted that it 
requires some special circumstance to bring it to 
our attention. To be sure there is a certain irre- 
ducible minimum of exhilaration that the man of 
brisk circulation and sound lungs carries about 
with him constantly, but for the most the fre- 
quently recurring functions rarely intrude them- 
selves in consciousness. It is only after the 
oppression of submitting to the stuffiness of a 
badly ventilated room that we keenly appreciate 
the pleasure of a deep draught of fresh air; or 
when catching our " second wind " after a suffo- 
cation that we consciously realize the joy of 
breathing as far down as the waist-line. In these 
cases the air is like wine, and the pleasure of a 
breath as poignant as that of drinking when 
thirsty. It should be noted, however, that in the 
case of the extremely vital functions, any really 
considerable thwarting necessarily brings us so 
near to utter collapse that much time is necessary 
to restore anything like normal functioning; and 
hence the gratification, which would ordinarily 
mark our return to equilibrium, is entirely 
obscured by the after-effects of shock. For 
example the choking gasps of a person who has 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 27 

almost been drowned fail to offset the widespread 
discomfort that has been stirred up within. 

The pleasures so far considered have centered 
about the organic functions of especial importance 
in maintaining the life of an individual. t There 
remains one function, the appropriate perform- 
ance of which has little importance in furthering 
the individual's life, but which is as indispensable 
for the race as breathing is for the individual. It 
is provided accordingly that reproduction should 
be attended by a pleasurability corresponding to 
its vast importance to the race. Continuous 
existence of the race can be assured only by a 
superabundance of lustfulness in the individual. 
Unique in its importance, sexual gratification is 
also unique in its conscious quality. Though less 
intense than the pleasure derived from satisfying 
acute hunger or thirst, it is, however, much more 
general in its bodily reverberations. No dramas 
have ever been written about hunger or thirst. 
Occasionally the bibulousness of a Falstaff or the 
sweet tooth of a " Chocolate Soldier " add to the 
gayety of the nations; but such literary effect is 
usually limited to the comic, and offers not a frac- 
tion of the intricacy to which the sex motive so 



28 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

readily lends itself. The latter is so inexhaustibly 
fertile in new and interesting possibilities that it 
will probably continue to inspire the " best 
sellers " as long as the novel is a popular form 
of pastime. Hence it is not possible to limit 
sexual gratification strictly to a single local refer- 
ence; it has a widespreadness of bodily content 
which no other pleasure can begin to equal. All 
that the poets have written of love bears out the 
fact that every sensitive part of the body plays 
a potent part in this connection. For lovers, the 
merest touch of the hand, the meeting of the lips, 
or the clasping embrace, — all are forms of caress 
which offer intense physical satisfaction. There 
is certainly no little plausibility in Freud's con- 
jecture that the whole body was originally a more 
or less undifferentiated seat of sexual desire, and 
that only by degrees of development have we 
reached the stage of highly specialized reference. 

Pleasantness 

A life limited to tickling and bodily gratification 
would be indeed poor in pleasure. There are few 
people who would not prefer the lot of Socrates 
dissatisfied to that of the pig content, even if the 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 29 

choice were made on purely epicurean grounds; 
for one of the outstanding facts about pleasure is 
that innumerable varieties of pleasantness, taken 
together, completely outweigh the grosser and 
individually more intense gratifications. 

What has already been said of unpleasantness 
holds good with appropriate modifications for 
pleasantness. It is so lacking in definiteness that 
it seems to take on the character of whatever it 
happens to be associated with. One must have 
a certain introspective skill in order to separate 
the pleasantness from the sweet taste, from the 
sight of the blue horizon, or from the smell of 
the rose. We meet with most success if we take, 
to begin with, something disagreeable and weaken 
it gradually until it first becomes indifferent, then 
mildly pleasant. For example, the taste of grape- 
fruit, by contrast with stronger bitter tastes, is for 
most people quite agreeable; a very faint whiff 
of rank smell adds to the palatal appeal of certain 
cheeses; musk and civet are sickening until dif- 
fusion renders them pleasant; and distance lends 
enchantment to even the harsh tones of the 
trumpet. In all of these cases, a sensation dis- 
agreeable at normal intensity becomes pleasing as 



3 o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

it grows weaker; and we have a much better 
opportunity to catch pleasantness at work than 
when we apply ourselves to tastes, smells, and 
sounds of a sort that could hardly be unpleasant 
under any circumstances. 

But such occasions are decidedly the exception. 
Every possible variation in our mental life seems 
to bring with it a kind of pleasure peculiar to it. 
Whether one converses with friends, listens to a 
concert, or realizes his ambitions, the pleasantness 
in each case is so intimately a part of the particu- 
lar situation that it is impossible to disentangle it 
and to regard it as something sui generis. Like 
the clay which readily assumes any desired form 
in the hands of a modeler, pleasantness is all things 
to all states of mind; it is so much undifferentiated 
stuff, having in its own right only the fundamental 
characteristic of being agreeable and associating 
itself in such a variety of contexts that we speak 
equally often of a pleasant sight, a pleasant 
thought, or a pleasant mood. 

The numerous bodily attitudes expressive of 
pleasantness are to be understood as the result of 
special adaptations of an original vague tendency 
to expand and approach. In an organism not 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 31 

developed in intelligence we may imagine that 
pleasantness would express itself simply as a gen- 
eral unfolding and drawing alongside the pleasing 
object. In ourselves, the beaming smile, the open 
hands, and the readiness to come forward are the 
special developments of this general bodily recep- 
tivity. But though this forward-coming attitude 
of taking in as much as possible of the agreeable, 
makes it easier for us to know most about what 
we like best, it remains true that the pleasantness 
itself, like unpleasantness, is vague and obscure. 
When given over to it with complete abandon, our 
speech becomes reduced to mere ejaculation and 
our thought correspondingly limited. It is partly 
for this reason that one who thoroughly enjoys art 
or music is in a measure handicapped in his criti- 
cism by his very capacity for enjoyment. The 
story is told of a celebrated German pianist, that 
persistent effort to obtain his views on Beethoven 
and Wagner elicited only two brief expressions: 
" Beethoven ist gut; Wagner ist nicht gut." 

Summary 

Xo summarize briefly what has been said 
regarding the three chief types of pleasure : 



32 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

Tickling, produced by stimulating the surface 
of the body, calls forth a fairly definite pleasure 
sensation and a laughter reaction. It varies ex- 
tremely from individual to individual. 

Gratification, or the pleasure derived from 
satisfying the needs of inner organs, is distinctly 
experienced for each of the vital needs. The 
pleasure in each case seems to reside most particu- 
larly in the general region of the organ concerned, 
but it is by no means possible to give it an exact 
location. 

Pleasantness is least of all capable of exact 
location or definition. The characteristic reaction 
is an attitude of the whole body which, in some 
fashion, goes out to meet the agreeable object and 
to further relations with it. It never appears 
separately, but always as the accompaniment of 
some other state, such as sensation, emotion, 
memory, or thought. 



CHAPTER III 

Probable Origin and Development 
of Pain and Pleasure 

Do animals feel pain and pleasure ? For the man 
on the street who beats his horse in order to drive 
him faster, it is almost axiomatic that the horse 
feels pain. The organization of a " Society for 
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and the 
widespread sentiment against vivisection could 
hardly have come about without an intuitive 
disposition to answer this question in the affirma- 
tive. And as for pleasure, there is hardly a dog 
fancier in the world who does not interpret the 
dog's wagging of his tail as in some sense the 
equivalent of the human smile, and there is 
certainly no one on speaking terms with cats who 
does not understand a particularly sonorous pur- 
ring to mean that kitty is in a decidedly optimistic 
frame of mind. But when one attempts to draw 
the line and decide the extent to which pain is felt 

33 



34 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

throughout the animal kingdom, the question at 
once becomes peculiarly difficult. If we take as 
examples animals that are very low in the evolu- 
tionary scale, it seems most questionable to attrib- 
ute cruelty to acts which, if applied to ourselves, 
would be deemed brutal. [The fisherman, for all 
the sharpness of his hook, would resent any atten- 
tion from the " Society for the Prevention of 
Cruelty to Animals." Animal psychologists have 
often noted how philosophically the earth worm 
submits to having his body cut in two. Instead of 
giving outward indication that he objects seriously 
to such gross bodily mutilation, he proceeds along 
in his usual leisurely manner, scorning the things 
of the flesh. Examples of a similar kind might be 
multiplied indefinitely. 

All speculation as to the state of mind of any 
animal is based on indirect evidence. Such evi- 
dence as is available suggests very strongly that 
there have been three fairly distinct stages in the 
evolutionary history of pleasure-pain in animals. 
The first stage — that of the lowest organisms — 
was probably one in which there was only a crude 
experience of well-being, or of malaise, — the raw 
stuff of pleasantness and unpleasantness. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 35 

The pain-pleasure reactions of the animal in 
this stage would be limited to total bodily move- 
ments of retreat or approach. The second stage, 
that of animals a little higher up, would include, 
in addition to the primitive pleasantness-un- 
pleasantness, the more specialized experiences of 
gratification and distress. The highest stage, that 
of animals relatively near the top of the scale, 
would include, in addition to the preceding states, 
the very special sensations of pain and of tickling. 

As an example of the first stage we may examine 
the behavior of an amoeba. This simplest of all 
animals is lacking in anything which remotely 
resembles a nervous system. Its whole body, in 
fact, consists of a single cell, and its behavior is 
limited to three reactions. The negative reaction 
is brought about whenever the amoeba collides 
with a solid obstacle, or moves into an overheated 
region or when a ray of light falls on one side or 
an electric current is passed through the water. 
What the amoeba does in such cases is to check 
any movement in the direction of the unfavorable 
stimulus, and to withdraw or change direction by 
contracting pretty much its whole body. It is the 
same sort of thing that we do when we find our- 



3* 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



selves in an unpleasant situation ; and if we venture 
to credit the amoeba with a state of mind, its 
attitude is probably a vague " I don't like it." 




..©=*^ 




Fig. i. — Amoeba chasing and attempting to ingest an euglena. (After 
, Jennings. From Washburn's " The Animal Mind," Courtesy the 
Macmillan Co.) 

And just as dislike in ourselves involves our whole 
body, we must suppose that the vague discomfort 
of the amoeba could not be referred to any exact 
spot. Its malaise probably pervades the whole 
of its small structure. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 37 

The positive reaction is given whenever the 
amoeba comes into gentle contact with a solid 
surface or with food. Under either of these 
circumstances it continues to come nearer and to 
further its contact. The solid object is used as a 
surface on which to creep, and the food will call 
forth the third type of reaction, that of food- 




Fig. 2. — Positive reaction of Paramecium to pleasant contact. (After 
Jennings. From Washburn's " The Animal Mind," Courtesy the 
Macmillan Co.) 

taking. Be it said to the credit of the amoeba, its 
habits in regard to meals are marked by the 
utmost simplicity and informality. The process 
consists in simply opening up the whole body and 
gradually surrounding the food particle entire. 
The expansiveness of both the positive and the 
food-taking reaction correspond to the general 
motor effects of pleasantness in ourselves. It has 



3 8 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

already been noted that when we are pleased every 
gesture and expression indicates an openness and 
accessibility which is just opposite of the shrinking 
withdrawal produced by unpleasantness; and on 
the basis of the same kind of reaction in the 
amoeba one is tempted to ascribe to it the capacity 
for a vague feeling of well-being, which can not 
be distinctly referred to any one part of the body, 
although it may result from contact at one or the 
other side of the body. 

Like the amoeba the other simple organisms 
have their vague but effective likes and dislikes. 
The human pleasure seeker who goes to the 
northern summer colony and the southern winter 
resort, hoping to bask in a moderate temperature 
the year round is only doing on a grand scale what 
the paramoecium — another one-celled organism 
— does on a small scale. Holmes * found that 
" if paramoecia are placed in a trough, one end of 
which is heated to 35 ° C, while the other is 
placed upon ice, they will form a band near the 
middle where the temperature ranges from 24 
to 28 C." Marked preferences and dislikes are 

1 S. J. Holmes, "The Evolution of Animal Intelligence," 
New York, 1916, p. 58. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



39 



likewise expressed in regard to the other elemen- 
tary influences which so readily affect us favorably 
or unfavorably, such as the intensity of light, the 
kind of chemical stimulation, or the pressure 
against solid support. Vague and diffuse as we 
must suppose these feelings to be in the lowest 
animals, as indeed they are in ourselves, they may 





d c 








■ 


l 


? d e 


b 



/ 

Fig. 3. — Reactions of paramoecia to heat and cold. One end of the 
slide is heated to 35 ° C. while the other end is kept on ice. The 
Paramoecia gather in an intermediate zone d c. (From Holmes' 
" Evolution of Animal Intelligence," Courtesy Henry Holt & Co.) 

call forth the most pronounced attitudes of 
11 willingness " or " unwillingness." Thus the 
liking of earwigs for the snugness of crevices is so 
strong that, " if given an opportunity to wedge 
themselves under a glass plate (they) will remain 
there, even when exposed to strong light," * and 
this despite their usual dislike for light. 

If we pass on to animals enough higher in the 

1 Holmes, op. cit, p. 36. 



4 o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

evolutionary scale to have the merest rudiments of 
a nervous system, we seem to find the beginnings 
of organic gratification and distress. The indi- 
rect evidence that an animal experiences the pleas- 
ure of gratification is that his behavior seems 
impelled by specific cravings, such as those of 
hunger or sex. When an animal deprived of 
food for some time behaves in an unusual manner 
in the presence of food, it is reasonable to suppose 
that the satisfaction of its hunger yields it a special 
form of pleasure; likewise when an animal over- 
comes many obstacles and travels long distances in 
order to join company with its mate, it is hard 
not to believe that the sex impulse is in some 
measure a source of peculiar gratification to that 
animal. 

Now actually an animal as primitive as the jelly- 
fish shows what might almost be called a hunger 
reaction. That is, when it has gone unfed for 
some time it will leave its attachment to the 
bottom of the water, swim to the top, then turn 
over, and with its " umbrella " spread out, float 
slowly to the bottom, thus disposing itself very 
favorably for catching any food in its vicinity. 
This procedure of swimming to the top and float- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 41 

ing to the bottom may be kept up for a whole day 
by a " hungry " jelly-fish. A starfish, if kept for 
several days without food, will instantly perceive 
and crawl toward food the presence of which it 
would not notice when in a different physiological 
condition. Romanes found it possible to lead a 
hungry starfish about the floor of its tank in any 
direction simply by keeping a small piece of food 
within smelling distance. Moreover, animals of 
this type seem to make a distinction between 
apparent and real satisfaction from food. Thus 
the experiment has often been made of tricking 
the animals into taking in paper soaked with the 
juice of crab-meat. Hunger makes the animal a 
ready victim to the ruse but the deception is soon 
discovered and the spurious food rejected. This 
unwillingness to accept as bread " that which 
satisfieth not," bespeaks the capacity for a fairly 
definite pronouncement on the part of the diges- 
tive apparatus. 

The sex impulse reaches extraordinary acute- 
ness in insects. To cite a case from Washburn, 1 
11 Forel says he had a female saturnalia moth 

*M. F. Washburn, "The Animal Mind," New York, 1913, 
p. 87. 



42 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

shut up in his city room, and that within a short 
time a number of males came and beat against the 
window. Riley hatched in Chicago seven moths 
from the ailanthus silkworm, which were care- 
fully confined. No other specimens were known 
to exist within hundreds of miles. A virgin 
female was put in a wicker cage on an ailanthus 
tree, and a male, with a silk thread tied around 
the abdomen for identification, was liberated a 
mile and a half away. The next morning the two 
were together." 

The best illustration of bodily distress in the 
lower organisms is to be found perhaps in the case 
of the earthworm, an animal which, as was noted 
a few pages back, appears to be immune from the 
specific sensation of pain such as would be pro- 
duced in us by lacerating the surface of the body. 
But let it not be inferred from the lack of " sur- 
face pain " that the earthworm is exempt from 
all varieties of painfulness. Prolonged and 
harmfully intense stimulation seem to call forth 
from its simple nervous system reactions that bear 
much resemblance to our writhing response to 
great internal distress which we are helpless to 
avoid or to relieve. Jennings has distinguished 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 43 

six different degrees of excitement which can be 
obtained by persistently " stirring up " an earth- 
worm with an ever-increasing stimulus. His 
description of the two last degrees of excitement 
presents an unmistakable picture of bodily dis- 
tress, as follows: 

44 (e) A state of still greater excitement, after 
long-continued and intense stimulation. Now the 
worm responds to a stimulus at the anterior end, 
that would in a resting worm cause only a com- 
paratively slight reaction, by a rapid ' right-about- 
face.' [The body is suddenly doubled at its 
middle, so that the anterior and posterior halves 
become parallel, with the two ends pointing in the 
same direction, then the posterior half is quickly 
whipped about, so that the whole worm is again 
straight, but is facing the opposite direction from 
that in which it was pointed before the reaction. 

"(f) A state of still more intense excitement, 
after repeated strong stimulation that is of such 
a character as to actually injure the tissues. The 
worm now responds ... by lifting the anterior 
fourth of the body into a vertical position, and 
waving it about in a frantic manner. This 
behavior is usually alternated with the right-about- 



44 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

face reactions, and with persistent rapid crawling 
backward and forward." 1 

The behavior above described has so much in 
common with our own reactions to violent bodily 
distress that we must conclude that the earthworm, 
for all his indifference to being cut in two, has a 
fairly well developed organic sensitivity of some 
kind. It will be remembered that the human 
stomach, intestine, kidneys, etc., are absolutely 
irresponsive to the surgeon's knife, but that when 
disordered in function they may easily become 
sources of excruciating agony. It would seem 
that the earthworm's capacity to experience pain is 
about on a par with that of our own vital organs. 
This conjecture is further supported by the fact 
that the special nervous system which supplies the 
viscera — the so-called sympathetic nervous sys- 
tem — is a much more primitive affair than the 
nervous system proper, by means of which we see, 
hear, feel surface pain, etc. The former is a dif- 
fuse system of nerve fibers and ganglia not wholly 
unlike the rudimentary nervous system of the 
earthworm; it is more adapted for communicating 
the vague aches of disordered organs than the 

1 Quoted from Holmes, op. cit., p. 148. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 45 

exact pains from the surface of the body. [The 
fact that the earthworm has this kind of nervous 
system, and that its behavior gives indications of 
distress, but not of pain, makes it a plausible con- 
jecture that we have in it an example of the second 
stage in the evolution of pain; namely, the stage 
which implies a capacity for limited unpleasant- 
ness and for organic distress. 

It is impossible to say exactly at what point one 
can first begin to trace evidences of the experience 
of surface pain and of tickling, but two general 
statements may be made with a fair show of 
reason: 

First, pain and pleasure do not appear as clear 
cut and definite sensations except in animals with 
11 central " nervous systems, i. e., with something 
of a brain and spinal cord connection. 

Second, pain as a sensation, has been much more 
fully developed than has pleasure. It is a much 
more constant sort of psychic fact throughout the 
animal series than is tickling. In the struggle for 
existence it was obviously much more important 
for an animal to know what not to do in order to 
avoid trouble than to know what to do in order 
to afford itself pleasure. Consequently we find 



46 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

that all of the higher animals, i. e., those with 
cerebro-spinal nervous systems, react in very much 
the same manner to an injury to the skin, whereas 
the reaction to tickling pleasure varies widely from 
animal to animal and from individual to indi- 
vidual. 

The possession of a surface pain sensation 
together with a central nervous system has given 
the higher animals a double advantage in the 
struggle for existence. Surface pain sensitivity 
means that the animal will be aware of danger 
before the wound has become vitally serious, and 
the possession of a brain means that pain-causing 
objects will soon be taken for what they are and 
left scrupulously alone. A species thus equipped 
with special pain receptors and with special 
faculties for learning by experience may continue 
to exist and prosper in a rigorous environment 
even though the number of individuals be small. 
The lower animals are obliged to make up in 
fertility of offspring what they lack individually in 
equipment for guarding against the painful. As 
James * has expressed it, " those fishes which are 
no sooner thrown back from the hook into the 

1 James, op. cit, p. 99. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 47 

water than they automatically seize the hook 
again, would soon expiate the degradation of their 
intelligence by the extinction of their type, did not 
their extraordinary fecundity atone for their 
imprudence." It is still a moot question what 
sort of nervous change takes place when the burnt 
child learns to dread the fire, but it is evident that 
brains and a specific pain sensation take their 
places together as the peculiar birthright of those 
beings whose individual welfare is relatively 
precious. It is almost as if Nature — ■ to use the 
term personally — had discovered, after many 
biological experiments, that life could be admin- 
istered more economically by having a few individ- 
uals equipped with pain and brain than by a mere 
prodigal output of painless and unteachable 
creatures left to take their chances in a world full 
of mischance. 

Tickling, even in human beings, shows an 
inconstancy and unsteadiness that stand in marked 
contrast to the insistence and unvarying steadiness 
of pain. As it is more vitally important to be able 
to avoid the hurtful than to seek the agreeable, we 
may well expect to find that tickling is a late 
acquisition and not even yet possessed of the 



48 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

stability of a full-fledged sensation. There is, 
however, considerable evidence that the animals 
just below ourselves in the scale of intelligence are 
capable of being made to " laugh " by means of 
the sensory effect of tickling. Darwin speaks of 
anthropoid apes giving out " a reiterated sound, 
corresponding with our laughter, when tickled, 
especially under the armpits." 

Dogs derive endless pleasure from the many 
varieties of mild friction of the skin. A gentle 
patting and rubbing will usually produce a slow 
wagging of the tail, which is the dog's most natural 
smile. People well acquainted with dogs are, 
according to Hall and Allin, almost unanimous 
in their verdict that the dog draws back the 
corners of his mouth if tickled in the ribs and thus 
literally and physiologically " smiles." When the 
tickling is somewhat sportively administered, dogs 
are likely to have their " funny streaks " and to 
" run around in a circle, sometimes showing their 
teeth in a peculiar way, perhaps lifting the upper 
lip when they play with children they know, but 
never with strangers." * With dogs as with 

1 Hall and Allin., The Psychology of Tickling and Laughter, 
Am. J. of Psych., 1898. 




be 

< 

I 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 49 

human beings it is the friendly hand that tickles 
most, or at least most pleasurably. L The cat is 
much more impersonal in its preferences as to who 
shall do the tickling and rubbing. Any well- 
tamed cat will arch a comfortable back for any 
inoffensive person who chooses to stroke her. 
Tickling proper is readily obtained from cats by 
light intermittent touches about the face and 
throat, and ordinarily calls forth a spirited form 
of friskiness, in which the close relation of tickling 
to mock injury is especially evident. 

Horses, lambs, etc., although they give con- 
spicuous evidence of the sheer joy of living, as 
when they jump, snort, paw and roll about, never 
seem to get beyond the stage of organic gratifica- 
tion. Tickling appears to be a distinctly unpleas- 
ant experience for them. If one tries a light 
touch with the tassel of a whip the only response 
provoked will usually be a general quiver or 
shudder such as we would give in response to a 
vexatious treatment of our skin. Thus it appears 
that while surface pain is an endowment of at 
least all of the vertebrates, the pleasure of tickling 
is limited to a very few of the highest vertebrates, 
notably the cat, the dog, and the monkey, 



f$o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

and is a quite variable experience even among 
them. 

The late development of surface pain and 
ticklishness in the animal series is paralleled by 
their lateness in appearing in the human infant. 
Though babies cry abundantly as a result of 
organic discomfort of various sorts, it seems that 
for weeks, and even months, they may be — like 
animals far down in the scale of evolution — not 
painfully aware of any laceration of the skin. 
The writer knows personally a case in which the 
mother of a baby of four months in dressing her 
child unwittingly penetrated the infant's skin with 
a safety pin in such a manner that the fastening 
included a pin length of outer surface skin. The 
baby, though left in this way for ten hours, made 
not the slightest outcry throughout the day. The 
same mother reports that in cutting her child's 
finger nails she has occasionally pricked the finger 
and even drawn blood without any noticeable 
response from the baby. The exact time of 
appearance of the pain sensation probably varies 
as widely in different individuals as do the times 
of learning to talk and walk, but it is at least not 
present at birth, and may not appear for months. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 51 

Tickling also develops very gradually, first one 
and then another zone becoming ticklish. A four 
months' old baby which will giggle as a result of 
being tickled about the neck, may fail to display 
any such sensitiveness when the soles of its feet 
are concerned. When he is a few months older, 
these latter may be the most ticklish parts of his 
body. 

Summary 

To sum up what has been said in the present 
chapter: It has been found that pain and pleas- 
ure as sensations have probably been evolved 
gradually out of a primitive obscure state of well- 
being or pleasantness and malaise or unpleasant- 
ness. The three distinct stages of development 
for which we found evidence were: 

( 1 ) The primitive stage of pleasantness — 
— unpleasantness itself, which apparently exists in 
some fashion in all animals, even down to the one- 
celled organism such as the amoeba. 

(2) The next stage was that of bodily gratifica- 
tion and distress, the kind of pleasure-pain expe- 
rience which we get from our inner organs. 
These states seemed to be discoverable in those 



52 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

animals just beginning to develop a rudimentary 
nervous system of the same general type as the 
" sympathetic nervous system " which supplies our 
inner organs. Animals of many cells but inverte- 
brate, such as the earthworm, were seen to offer 
an excellent example of the capacity for bodily 
distress without the possibility of pain proper. 

(3) The last stage was that of surface pain 
and ticklishness. This stage implies the posses- 
sion of a fairly well developed central nervous 
system, and may be said roughly to include the 
vertebrate animals, except that ticklishness is the 
unique possession of the highest vertebrates and 
is very unevenly present even among them. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Meaning of Pain and Pleasure 

In order to form an adequate notion of the 
essential character of pain and pleasure it will be 
necessary for us to refer constantly to two facts, 
both of them sufficiently obvious, but too often 
lost sight of in the present connection. These 
two facts are ( i ) the readiness with which pleas- 
ure goes over into pain and pain into pleasure, 
and (2) the connection of both states with the 
struggle for existence. 

The first fact, — the ready interchangeability of 
pain and pleasure when conditions are slightly 
changed, — is one which can be abundantly illus- 
trated from any department of life. pThe same 
hardship that is the chief delight of the well 
trained and athletic person is utterly intolerable 
to one fatigued or lacking in physical strength. 
For the former the violent exertion of climbing a 
mountain is sheer joy, and he would find nothing 

53 



54 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

more unendurable than the absence of all exertion. 
The latter is continually on his guard against 
having to tax his powers. He can hardly repre- 
sent pleasure to himself except as consisting of 
flowery beds of ease ; and by the same token pain 
is for him practically synonymous with vigorous 
effort. 

Moreover, it is possible that the same task may 
appear at one moment painful and at another 
pleasurable to the same man, not as the result of 
any change in his physical condition, but according 
to whether he adopts the attitude of work or play. 
The same tasks which the average man abhors to 
perform as household chores form the chief joy 
of picnicking or camping put. With remarkable 
avidity he bears his share of carrying the packs or 
building the fire, when it is all done just for the 
fun of it. In the same way the exercise of danc- 
ing may be enjoyed even by frail young ladies on 
the point of physical exhaustion, although it would 
be excruciating torture to these people, if pre- 
scribed to them by a physician, and in the form of 
calisthenics to be gone through just after rising 
and before going to bed. It is more than the 
mere perversity of human nature which makes it 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 55 

possible for the tired shop girl to find in the dance 
hall recreation from the footsore weariness caused 
by a long day's work. 

Further than this, the outward expression of 
pain and pleasure has some connection such that 
the two may be confused in persons of nervous 
instability. The following cases, mentioned by 
Hall and Allin, 1 illustrate strikingly this tendency, 
especially on the part of immature or hysterical 
persons : " A company of young people, of both 
sexes, from 19 to 24, were sitting together when 
the death of an acquaintance was announced. 
They looked at each other for a second and then 
all began to laugh, and it was some time before 
they could become serious." " A frontiersman in 
a well-authenticated case, came home to find his 
dearly beloved wife and children all lying dead, 
scalped and mutilated by Indians. He burst out 
into a fit of laughter, exclaiming repeatedly, i It 
is the funniest thing I ever heard of,' and laughed 
on convulsively and uncontrollably until he died 
from a ruptured blood vessel." 2 

To go a step further, it can be said without 

iHall and Allin, op. ck. 
2 Ibid. 

\ 



56 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

exaggeration that our profoundest pleasures are 
those which have the nearest relation to possible 
or actual pain. [The very horror of falling off a 
great height or out of a swiftly moving vehicle 
furnishes the background for the intense thrill in 
taking daredevil chances with an aeroplane or 
automobile. The painful start of fear which any 
child gives in response to a sudden change in his 
surroundings is of a piece with the acute delight 
that he gets from the friendly Boo! of those 
who make believe with his fears. It is the pain- 
ful emotions of fear and pity which, when skill- 
fully played upon, afford the extraordinary joy 
that the theater lover derives from tragedy. In 
this special case the direct contemplation of tre- 
mendous sadness or gruesome Rightfulness may 
leave the spectator sighing deep with the content- 
ment of a really edifying experience. 

[The same ready interchangeability of pain and 
pleasure is observable when we note some of the 
characteristic effects that result from the lapse of 
time. An embarrassing social blunder, which 
covers one with mortification at the time of its 
occurrence, may within a few weeks become a 
never failing source of laughter and pleasure as 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 57 

one reflects on it afterward. Perhaps he may 
even bore his neighbors with the frequent recount- 
ing of the incident which he now enjoys so heartily. 
Joy in the memory of past griefs is a fact 
remarked on by Homer, whereas Dante was espe- 
cially impressed with the painful memory of past 
pleasures, saying that the greatest sorrow was to 
recollect one's happier time when in misery. 

The cases mentioned so far have had to do 
more with pleasantness-unpleasantness than with 
surface pleasure and pain, but the same general 
statement will be found to obtain for these states. 
We have already seen that the ticklishness of a 
given part of the body varies directly with the 
vulnerability of that part, and that tickling when 
overdone becomes distinctly disagreeable or pain- 
ful. Further than this, surface pain sensations, 
when very faintly experienced, may be productive 
of the greatest pleasure of which the skin is 
capable. Thus the pleasure of picking a partly 
healed scab is so alluring that children have been 
known to make cuts on their hands for the definite 
purpose of creating a scab. Tearing away a frag- 
ment of slightly sensitive callous skin is another 
of the " real sports n of childhood. But it is the 



5 8 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

faint pain of scratching an itching area which is 
preeminent in this respect. " You scratch my 
back and I'll scratch yours," is the homely adage 
based on the peculiar satisfaction that this mildly 
painful treatment of the skin affords. 

It appears then that from whatever angle we 
begin our consideration of pain and pleasure, we 
find everywhere abundant illustration of the fact 
of ready interchangeability. Both of them seem 
to issue from the same general circumstances; 
when pain issues, it is only because of an excess of 
the same conditions which when less extreme result 
pleasurably. What are these conditions? 

In order to answer this question we shall have 
to make mention of the second of the two facts 
referred to at the beginning of the chapter, i. e., 
that life is inevitably a struggle. A ceaseless con- 
flict between an environment that imposes ob- 
stacles and an organism that tends to pit itself 
against obstacles, — this is the fundamental con- 
dition of life, and there are no other terms at 
which it is to be had. Whether we think of our 
bodily existence as a struggle between the forces 
making for growth and those making for disinte- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 59 

gration, or whether we think of our personal life 
in society as a competitive struggle in which each 
individual is spurred on to render a good account 
of himself, the reflection is continually forced on 
us that without strife there can be no life. As 
soon as any part of the body is freed from the 
performance of its tasks, it begins to atrophy; as 
soon as any individual proves his unfitness to cope 
with the conditions that surround him, he is 
immediately reckoned as of no account; and when 
an institution ceases to find things worth fighting 
for we ask what is its reason for being. Born as 
we are to a world of this sort it is only natural 
that we should enter it equipped with an abun- 
dance of active dispositions. To a world which 
demands effective responses we bring more or less 
ready-made tendencies to respond, all of them 
waiting for the appropriate occasion when they 
may be brought into play. Thus prepared with 
innumerable impulses, desires, reflexes and in- 
stincts, we venture out into endless enterprise, 
some of which is to be attended by success, some 
by failure. When our activity arrives at its end, 
i. e., encounters successfully the conditions it was 



60 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

designed to meet, we experience pleasure. 1 When, 
in spite of our utmost resource, the demands made 
of us cannot be met, we experience pain. For 
example, a keenly contested game brings to the 
victor a pleasure he could not have known if his 
rival had not been a worthy match for him. And 
vice versa, to be defeated at the hands of an 
acknowledged rival, who challenges our utmost 
effort, this is indeed to drink the cup of bitterness. 
[To state the same point in somewhat different 
language, one may say that all pleasure and pain 
center about the efforts of a living organism to 
further its development. Such an organism 
refuses to rest satisfied with what it has attained, 
and strives not only to hold what it has attained, 
but continually to add new worlds to those already 
conquered. Any given state of equilibrium is 
therefore indifferent or even positively painful if 
too long maintained. Enforced idleness soon 
brings with it the pain of boredom to an organism 
ready for the fray. Not a few business men who 
have retired at a ripe old age have found it neces- 
sary to go back to die in harness. Business capac- 

1 See W. Fite, "The Place of Pleasure and Pain in Functional 
Psychology," Psychol. Rev., 1903, X, 633-644. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 61 

ities ready at hand and " stripped for racing " 
brook no check except at a cost of pain. It is 
evident then that within certain limits all dis- 
turbance of equilibrium is pleasant. The trained 
athlete " rejoicing as a strong man to run a race " 
makes a wide departure from the ease of the arm- 
chair, but counts his exertion a pleasure. It is 
equally obvious, however, that there are limits 
beyond which all disturbance of equilibrium is 
painful. The agonized expression of the runner 
who has punished himself too severely stands in 
marked contrast with the buoyancy of his better 
trained opponent. No matter with what zest we 
enter upon any form of activity there is a point 
beyond which it becomes intolerable. The or- 
ganism's task under such conditions is to restore 
the excessively disturbed equilibrium. It is only 
in this way that it can cope further with environ- 
ment, and accordingly it is recuperation that is 
now pleasurable. The struggle in such cases as- 
sumes a different character; it is a struggle to 
recover normal fitness, and though it is marked by 
no outward signs of striving, in reality certain 
vital processes are functioning to an unusual de- 
gree. Thus it is possible for the mountain- 



62 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

climber to derive keen pleasure both from his ex- 
ertion in the morning and from his rest in the 
afternoon. One is the pleasure of activity; the 
other is the pleasure of preparation for activity. 
Both types, different as they seem, depend on the 
efficient operation of active tendencies. 

[To sum up, all forms of pain and pleasure re- 
volve about the fact of conflict. Pain may arise 
either when the struggle makes excessive demands 
on us or when our powers, ready for activity, are 
denied the opportunity for employment. Pleas- 
ure may arise either from carrying on a struggle 
equal to our powers or from restoring equilibrium 
by rest after a severe struggle. It remains to 
apply the above account to the varieties of pain 
and pleasure which were described in the first 
chapter. 

Pleasantness and Unpleasantness 

We may begin with the cases of pleasantness 
and unpleasantness. Especially instructive here 
are the instances of acquired tastes. When a 
man is persuaded by his friends to learn to eat 
olives or drink beer, neither of which he likes at 
first, but which finally come to be numbered among 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 63 

his favorite indulgences, we may account for the 
change, according to our explanation by saying 
that these bitter tastes, with each successive adap- 
tation have produced a less violent palatal dis- 
turbance, until finally they have come within the 
range of disturbances against which the palate is 
able to pit itself. Thereafter they afford the 
relish of something difficult, but not too difficult. 
The same sort of process is probably at work 
when we acquire a liking for music which at first 
hearing seemed intolerably harsh and disssonant. 
Any one in the least familiar with the history of 
music knows how every great master has out- 
raged the tender feelings of critics of his day. 
The music that we most enjoy to-day would have 
been laughed out of court as unspeakably dis- 
agreeable two hundred years ago. More and 
more dissonant intervals have challenged the ears 
of each successive generation, and while each new 
innovation has created confusion and unpleasant- 
ness, it has been gradually mastered by the music- 
going public, which now demands that music be 
complex and even harsh in order to be enjoyable. 
Wagner had to struggle to persuade the world to 
endure harmonies which are to-day a chief re- 



64 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

source for popular nights at the symphony. The 
challenge which Wagner's orchestration bears to 
our ears still disturbs our auditory equilibrium, 
but we delight in going forth to meet the dis- 
turbance. It is within the range of our power to 
cope with it. 

Everything depends on whether the force called 
forth in ourselves is adequate to the demands 
made of it. So long as it is, there is no limit to 
the amount of disturbance which may be pleasant. 
The more keenly contested the struggle, the more 
enjoyable is the winning of the victory. 

We are now in a position to understand why 
a slight difference in bodily energy may make such 
a vast difference in our feeling attitude toward 
the same object. For the sick or weary man no 
form of strenuous activity is tolerable, because 
every effort compels him to overdraw his reserve. 
To one who is brimful of energy every struggle 
is a delight, because he is more than able to main- 
tain himself. For the same reason any new ac- 
cess of energy may convert an unpleasant into an 
extremely pleasant experience. How often, for 
example, does one who dreads some social event 
or public performance find his dread changed into 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 65 

sheer delight as the result of a stimulating cup of 
coffee! How often, also, is an article of dress 
that one dislikes personally, accepted with joy 
as a result of the knowledge that everybody is 
wearing that style ! Our effort when backed up 
by the powerful force of social suggestion can be 
made to cope with even the extreme hobble skirt 
or the ultra-modern dance. Vice versa, our per- 
sonal preference for a certain style of dress sur- 
vives with difficulty the edict of fashion that 
taboos such a style. 

The case of the picnicker's delight in gruesome 
toil now appears as merely a special instance in 
which the instinct of play has availed him of an 
extra supply of energy. Furthermore, it is now 
quite comprehensible that the painful fear of real 
danger should be so readily converted into the 
pleasant thrill of near or make-believe danger. 
The child begs to be half startled with a boo ! be- 
cause the mild shock is within the scope of his 
powers of resistance, and is therefore pleasurable. 
The same explanation obtains for the aviator's 
deviltry and for the pleasing effect of fear and 
pity in tragedy. For the same reason also a sud- 
den change from a flippant to a sober mood may 



66 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

make us turn with more relish to aching toil than 
to gay triviality. One who has girded up his 
loins does not cope with difficulty on quite the 
same terms as does one supine with " paunched 
ease." 

The notion that pleasure results from conflict 
adequately prepared for also renders it intelligible 
that past griefs may become pleasant. In mem- 
ory all things are likely to lose in intensity, and 
the grief that overwhelms us in its actual occur- 
rence might very conceivably mellow into a faded 
image of sorrow against which there is a certain 
pleasure in pitting one's self because the diffi- 
culty has been so far reduced. 

The confusion of the outward expressions of 
pain and pleasure, as when one laughs at dis- 
tressing news, we must suppose to be due to the 
fact that the shock has summoned forth even more 
energy than is normally to be expected. When 
such unusual laughter goes over into profound 
depression, we have but the natural reaction 
against the original excess. An interesting case 
in which we are able to observe a sudden change 
from amused pleasure to anxious concern is that 
in which we discover that the victim of a laugh- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 67 

able fall has seriously injured himself. Here the 
joy which comes in contrasting our own security 
with the humiliation of the man we laugh at is 
forced out by the intense pang of sympathy which 
is more than a match for us. 

The conception of life as a progressive conflict 
for which we are equipped by nature leads us to 
the discussion of two further points, — (1) the 
indifference of habitual acts and (2) the pain- 
fulness of repressing activities normally seeking 
expression. The former is too obvious to re- 
quire elaboration. It is exemplified in every 
routine act of our life. Every act which becomes 
so habitual as to be performed with ease ceases 
to afford pleasure or even consciousness. When 
we have become expert at bicycling or typewriting 
or playing the piano we are obliged to set our- 
selves new tasks or lose the joy in the perform- 
ance of these acts. We have acquired a facility 
which requires a very considerable activity for 
its full employment. 

The unpleasantness of thwarted activity is an- 
other instance of the need of allowing ample oc- 
casion for the exercise of native or acquired 
tendencies. When we take on a match at tennis 



68 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

with a player we suppose to be skillful, but dis- 
cover shortly that he is the merest novice, the un- 
pleasantness of ennui at once begins to set in, 
and unless we are able to divert ourselves by 
thoughts remote from the present occupation, we 
are in for an unhappy half hour. Our capacities 
for successful struggle of this particular form 
have been aroused only to be thwarted. Pre- 
pared for action we have no occasion for activity. 
All of the unpleasantness of monotony or boredom 
is of this same general type. In a passage quoted 
by Stout * from Brown's " Philosophy of the Hu- 
man Mind" the following question is asked: 
" What patience could travel for a whole day, 
along one endless avenue, with perfect parallel- 
ism of the two straight lines, and with trees of 
the same species and height, succeeding each other 
at exactly the same interval? " And it is pointed 
out that " what we should feel with most fret- 
fulness would be the constant disappointment of 
our expectation, that the last tree which we be- 
held in the distance was the last that was to rise 
upon us; when, tree after tree, as if in mockery 

*G. F. Stout, "Analytic Psychology," London, 1S96, Vol. II, 
p. 274. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 69 

of our very patience itself, would still continue 
to present the same dismal continuity of line." 
[The above is a single instance of capacities for 
activity denied their natural outlet. 

The pain of bereavement is to be understood in 
the same way. To quote again from Stout: 1 
11 The person taken from us has formed part 
of our life. So far as this is the case, his re- 
moval means the repression of our previous 
modes of thought and action. While the loss is 
recent, these preformed mental tendencies are 
stimulated by everything which can remind us of 
the deceased; but they are stimulated only to be 
crushed." Indeed, one need not have known any 
real sorrow in order to experience this kind of 
thwarting. To mislay a watch that one has car- 
ried for years may cause an uncomfortable feeling 
that lasts for days. Each mention of the time 
of day will provoke an incipient start for the 
watch pocket, followed by an acute annoyance be- 
cause there is no end to be attained by the ac- 
customed form of activity. 

1 Stout, op. cit., p. 278. 



7 o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

Bodily Distress and Gratification 

To turn now to the pain and pleasure connected 
with the functioning of the inner organs, we find 
once more that the same general principle holds 
good. Bodily distress is always due either to 
the violent disturbance of some organ or else to 
the baffling of some organic craving. As ex- 
amples of the first we have all of those cases of 
disordered functioning which make up the long 
list of aches, cramps, colics, etc. In all of these 
instances the organism finds itself confronted with 
excessive demands. If the surgeon even by cut- 
ting and pinching the stomach, fails to call forth 
any pain, that is because the stomach has not had 
an evolution which leads it to concern itself on 
such occasions. [The stimulus of cutting calls 
forth no effort on its part to ward off such an at- 
tack. But the presence of indigestible food in 
the stomach may produce colicky pain, because 
such a stimulus calls forth its utmost effort, and 
when this effort fails there results the peculiar 
quality of internal bodily pain. 

The nature of organic craving is also clearly 
illustrated in the case of the stomach. Its capac- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 71 

ity for aiding in the digestion of food may be the 
occasion for pain if the capacity is too long de- 
nied adequate employment. The contractions 
which proceed comfortably in the moderately 
filled stomach produce the gnawing pangs of 
hunger, when they take place in an empty stom- 
ach. An experiment by Cannon and Washburn 1 
has very neatly demonstrated this point. To 
quote from their account: " In order to learn 
whether such proof might be secured, one of us 
(W.) determined to become accustomed to the 
presence of a rubber tube in the oesophagus. Al- 
most every day for several weeks W. introduced 
as far as the stomach a small tube, to the lower 
end of which was attached a soft-rubber balloon 
about 8 cm. in diameter. The tube was thus 
carried about each time for two or three hours. 
. . . When a record was to be taken, the balloon, 
placed just below the cardia, was moderately dis- 
tended with air." After this preliminary prac- 
tice, " on the days of observation W. would ab- 
stain from breakfast, or eat sparingly, and with- 
out taking any lunch would appear in the labora- 

iW. B. Cannon and A. L. Washburn, "An Explanation of 
Hunger," American Journal of Physiology, vol. 29, 1911, p. 449. 



72 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

tory about two o'clock." With recording appa- 
ratus arranged the experiment proceeded, and 
" when W. stated that he was hungry, powerful 
contractions of the stomach were invariably be- 
ing registered. The record of W's introspection 
of his hunger pangs agreed closely with the record 
of his gastric contractions." Here is simply a 
new application of our pleasure-pain principle. 
[The normal activity of the stomach demands its 
normal exercise. If it is baffled in the realization 
of its appropriate ends, pain ensues. The 
thwarted stomach bereft of its food takes its place 
with the other cases of baffled expectation and 
demonstrates further that pain may be due either 
to the violence of the disturbance or to the futility 
of a readiness that is not allowed expression. 

The pleasure of eating a hearty meal is, by the 
same token, due to the putting forth of a con- 
siderable digestive effort when the stomach's 
readiness is likely to be equal to the task imposed 
upon it. Gastric preparedness like military pre- 
paredness likes nothing so well as the assimilation 
of adequate prey. 

The other forms of bodily distress and gratifi- 
cation are in every way comparable to the above. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 73 

The lungs may suffer from a local disturbance, as 
in pleurisy, or from a general thwarting of activ- 
ity, as in suffocation; the circulation may suffer 
from an excessive start when an emotional shock 
is experienced, or it may cause acute pain when 
the normal activity is obstructed as in angina pec- 
toris; and our nervous system as a whole may 
render us uncomfortable either on account of 
great strain or on account of repressed desires. 

Surface Pain and Pleasure 

A cut finger brings about very definite and 
violent movements designed to defend our skin 
against further harmful inroads. But no matter 
with what alacrity we respond, the best we can 
do is to prevent further damage; we have no effec- 
tive counter stroke which at once rights the wrong 
already done. The disturbance is excessive in 
that we are not adequately equipped with any ac- 
tivity tendency that is a match for it, and the 
inevitable result is pain. If, however, the dis- 
turbance is very slight, and can be completely 
relieved by some such activity as scratching, we 
have a really agreeable experience. The pleasure 
of tickling we saw to be related in all probability 



74 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

to the vulnerability of the parts tickled. Like 
playful fear this make-believe injury to the skin 
depends on the fact that the attack is something 
we are able to cope with. The disturbance merely 
threatens to become painful, and the normal de- 
fensive reaction, if successful, is quite capable of 
affording protection before harm is done. 
Within such limits it is to be expected that the 
more violent the outward behavior of the person 
tickled the more intense will be the thrill of pleas- 
ure that comes from entering into the struggle. 
The child who writhes and squirms is probably 
much nearer to the point of accepting the make- 
believe attack as a serious threat; he accordingly 
pitches the conflict at a high level of intensity, and 
hence derives keener pleasure from the whole per- 
formance. 

Cases where pain is caused by the thwarting of 
activities connected with the skin are somewhat 
harder to list, but every one has had the experi- 
ence of having a pain become much more severe 
on account of his being unable to move in re- 
sponse to it. Even an itching that cannot be 
scratched soon tries our self-control to the limit. 
If one were given his choice between a toothache 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 75 

to which he was free to minister, and an itching 
back that he was not allowed to scratch, it is prob- 
able that his choice would incline toward the 
former. 

Summary 

We have seen that all three varieties of pain 
and pleasure described in the first chapter can be 
best accounted for by reference to the fact that 
every living organism is born with the capacity 
for struggle, and in an environment where struggle 
is a fundamental law of nature. Pain signifies 
either that the environment has demanded too 
much of the organism! s limited capacities — the 
pains of excess, or that it has failed to offer a 
point of contact for unused activity tendencies — 
the pains of thwarting. Pleasure signifies either 
that the environment has furnished occasion for a 
conflict to which the organism's powers are equal 
— the pleasures of activity, or that opportunity 
is being afforded for recovery from a struggle car- 
ried to an extreme point- — ■ the pleasures of rest. 



CHAPTER V 

The Bodily Effects of Pain and 
Pleasure 

The popular notion in regard to the bodily ef- 
fects of pleasure and pain has it that in some way 
or other pleasure always tends to make our bodily 
machinery more efficient, and pain less so. 
While this notion has a considerable measure of 
truth in it, it falls far short of being an adequate 
statement of the case. Let us consider, for ex- 
ample, the implication that the immediate effects 
of the two are necessarily opposite. Far from 
this being the case, it is actually a fact that our 
most extreme pleasures have the same kind of 
immediate bodily result as does pain. This would 
naturally follow according to the view set forth 
in the preceding chapters, to the effect that the 
most vivid pleasures represent some sort of hard 
fought struggle which we have been fortunate 
enough to maintain successfully. We may best 

76 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 77 

judge of the facts by taking some well-known 
pain-effect, such as the production of sugar in the 
urine, and observing whether the same effect is 
produced by a violent form of pleasure. 

An opportunity for such an observation is to 
be had in connection with intercollegiate athletics. 
It needs little argument to prove that for the large 
majority of college undergraduates the one day 
of the year most supreme with pleasure is the day 
of the " big game." To quote from Dr. Can- 
non's description of this event, — " There is prac- 
tically a holiday in college and to a large extent in 
the city as well. The streets are filled with eager 
supporters of each team as the hosts begin to 
gather at the field. As many as 70,000 spectators 
may be present, each one tense and strongly 
partisan. The student bands lead the singing by 
thousands of voices of songs which urge to the 
utmost effort for the college. . . . Into the midst 
of that huge, cheering, yelling, singing, flag-wav- 
ing crowd, the players are welcomed in a special 
outburst of the same demonstration of enthusi- 
asm." x To quote the same author further, — 

1 W. B. Cannon, " Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and 
Rage," New York, 191 5, p. 2aoff. 



78 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

" In the dressing-room before a critical contest I 
have seen a c gridiron warrior,' ready in canvas 
suit, cleated shoes, and leather helmet, sitting 
grimly on a bench, his fists clenched, his jaws 
tight, and his face the color of clay. He per- 
formed wonderfully when the game began, and 
after it was over there was a large percentage of 
sugar in his urine." Further than this, we are 
informed that the observation taken on an ex- 
cited spectator in the Harvard-Yale game of 19 13 
showed a marked increase of sugar in the 
urine. 

Xo take still another effect which one most nat- 
urally attributes to extreme pain, — namely, col- 
lapse. There is abundant possibility of collapse 
from pleasure, either if the pleasure is very excit- 
ing or if the individual is very sensitive. Dear- 
born, in the " Influence of Joy " cites the case of 
Lucretia Davidson, the precocious American 
poetess who died at the age of seventeen. " Her 
susceptibilities were so acute, and her perception 
of beauty so exquisite, as to cause her to faint 
when listening to some of her favorite melodies 
from Moore. Yet notwithstanding this serious 
impression, she would beg to have them repeated, 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 79 

so delicious were the sensations produced." * 
Here then is evidence that conspicuous pain effects 
may be produced by supreme pleasure. It will be 
necessary, therefore, in making statements regard- 
ing the bodily effects of pleasure, to distinguish 
the milder and more restful pleasures from those 
marked by extreme activity. 

Another point which should not for a moment 
be lost sight of is the difference between imme- 
diate and final effects. For example, an obvious 
immediate effect of pain is a quickening of bodily 
activity. Darwin's oft-quoted " Expressions of 
the Emotions in Man and Animals " contains this 
statement: " In the agony of pain almost every 
muscle of the body is brought into strong action; 
great pain urges all animals, and has urged them 
during endless generations, to make the most 
violent and diversified efforts to escape from the 
cause of suffering." But when we consider the 
effects of pain in the long run we are obliged to 
think of it as depressing. Synonymous with sor- 
row and woe, it always calls up a picture of phy- 
sical inadequacy. 

1 G. V. N. Dearborn, "The Influence of Joy," Boston, 19^6, 
p. 96. 



8o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

In the limited scope of the present chapter we 
shall confine our discussion largely to those bodily 
effects which immediately appear as the result of 
pain and pleasure, and we shall refer chiefly to the 
milder pleasures. Two vitally important bodily 
effects will occupy our attention, those of diges- 
tion and of circulation. 

Effects on Digestion 

The first step which the body takes in the direc- 
tion of effective digestion is in starting the secre- 
tion of saliva. " Fletcherism " has at least done 
something toward educating the general public to 
the importance of beginning nutrition with an 
abundance of this first aid to digestion. Gen- 
erally speaking, it may be said that whatever 
causes the mouth to water is inspfar a help to 
digestion, and that vice versa, any slowing up of 
this secretion will render digestion so much more 
difficult. Now it is a pretty clearly established 
fact that pleasant associations of any kind tend 
to make the moistening of the mouth proceed 
easily, whereas pain and unpleasantness make it 
difficult or even impossible. So regular is this 
connection that some savages, as for example the 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 81 

Australians, express admiration by smacking and 
clacking the mouth. Children often add to the 
expression of their joy by various gurgling and 
trickling sounds; and even in adults the warm 
smile always carries with it a certain suggestion 
of moistness. A dry mouth, on the contrary, is a 
fairly constant accompaniment to marked unpleas- 
antness. It is for this reason that a mob is 
secretly impressed upon noting that the intended 
victim can stand and spit at those who would 
terrorize him. They realize that such an abun- 
dance of saliva would be impossible in a man 
afraid. Indeed, one well-known ancient method 
of determining guilt in a suspect was to try his 
power to produce saliva. In the ordeal of rice, 
employed in India, the judges assumed that the 
innocent man would have a normal flow, whereas 
the real culprit, wrought upon by his guilt, would 
have a dry mouth. The method of trial was 
therefore to have all of the suspects chew the 
consecrated rice and, after a time, spit it out upon 
a fig leaf. Whoever returned the rice dry was 
adjudged guilty, because it was supposed that the 
stopping of the secretion indicated the knowledge 
of guilt and fear of discovery. 



82 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

After salivary secretion the next important 
process in preparation for digestion is the secret- 
ing of gastric juice. And here again we find a 
very definite antagonism between pain and pleas- 
ure effects. Almost every one has noticed more 
or less clearly that in some strange way food eaten 
under pleasant surroundings is assimilated with 
more than ordinary ease, and without harmful 
after effects. The German beer-garden and the 
French cafe chantant flourish for this reason. 
In our own dyspeptic country this knowledge has 
been capitalized on an extravagant scale. The 
dominant theory of the big New York hotel to- 
day is that rich patrons will spare no price if every 
consideration of elegance, daintiness and personal 
comfort is provided in addition to good food. 

Pawlow, the noted Russian physiologist, has 
abundantly demonstrated in his experiments on 
dogs that a pleasurable food idea causes the stom- 
ach to begin watering, even though the food never 
reaches the stomach. Two details of this experi- 
ment will be necessary for a clear understanding 
of the point under discussion. For one thing, a 
device was provided which enabled the experi- 
menters to count the drops of gastric juice for a 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 83 

given interval of time. Another essential point 
was that the food eaten and swallowed by the dogs 
was in some cases not allowed to reach the stom- 
ach, but passed out through an opening artificially 
made below the throat. Whenever a dog was al- 
lowed the quiet pleasure of eating undisturbed for 
five minutes, — a procedure called " sham feed- 
ing " by the experimenters, because the food never 
reached the stomach — the gastric juice flowed 
in abundance, and as much as 67 cubic centimeters 
would sometimes be produced during twenty min- 
utes. If however, any unpleasant emotion were 
allowed to intrude itself on the dog's peace of 
mind, a most remarkable lowering of gastric pro- 
duction was the result. To quote from Cannon's 1 
description of such a case : " On another day a 
cat was brought into the presence of the dog, 
whereupon the dog flew into a great fury. [The 
cat was removed and the dog pacified. Now the 
dog was again given the sham feeding for five 
minutes. In spite of the fact that the animal was 
hungry and ate eagerly, there was no secretion 
worthy of mention. During a period of twenty 
minutes, corresponding to the previous observa- 

1 W. B. Cannon, op. cat, p. n. 



84 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

tion, only nine cubic centimeters were produced." 
Thus the gastric juice secreted in the stomach 
under normal conditions of eating is more than 
seven times ^s great as under conditions of emo- 
tional stress ! Well might Solomon write — > 
" Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than 
a stalled ox and hatred therewith." 

The disturbance of gastric secretion does not 
require any such fury of excitement as in the above 
instance. The direct stimulation of a pain nerve 
is most effective, and even the discomfort of a dog 
in new surroundings, or his annoyance at being 
tied, will often suppress the gastric flow. In 
children mere vexation at not being allowed to 
eat when they want to may render them incapable 
of digestion even though hungry. 

A third important part of the total process of 
digestion is what may be referred to as the me- 
chanical factor, i.e. the contractions of the stom- 
ach and intestines. This is the final process by 
which food is carried from one region to another 
in the alimentary canal. On this depends the as- 
similation of food, which has passed through the 
preliminary stages of digestion. When this 
movement ceases, food inevitably stagnates. The 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 85 

conclusions reached by Cannon in this department 
of digestion parallel in significance the experi- 
ment by Pawlow relating to gastric secretion. 
Again we find the same point for point antagonism 
between pleasure and pain effects. All things un- 
pleasant tend to check the peristaltic waves; all 
things pleasant tend to further them. Even such 
a slight emotional difference as that between the 
restiveness of the male cat and the calmness of 
the female cat when tied shows a corresponding 
difference in gastric peristalsis. The animals in 
the experiments referred to were restrained in a 
holder in order to be examined with Rontgen 
rays. " Although the holder was comfortable, 
the male cats, particularly the young males, were 
restive and excited on being fastened to it, and 
under the circumstances gastric peristaltic waves 
were absent; the female cats, especially if elderly, 
usually submitted with calmness to the restraint, 
and in them the waves had their normal occur- 
rence." 2 

That specific bodily distress has the same effect 
here as general unpleasantness, appears from the 
fact that the gastric contractions could always be 

a W. B. Cannon, op, cit., p. 14. 



86 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

stopped by shutting off the cat's breath for a short 
time. These facts observed in animals give the 
clue to the feeling of heaviness so often com- 
plained of in dyspeptics. The connection be- 
tween such stagnation and unpleasant or painful 
ideas is clearly seen in the following case. 1 " A 
refined and sensitive woman, who had digestive 
difficulties, came with her husband to Boston to 
be examined. They went to a hotel for the night. 
The next morning the woman appeared at the 
consultant's office an hour after having eaten a 
test meal. An examination of the gastric con- 
tents revealed — the presence of a considerable 
amount of the supper of the previous evening. 
[The explanation of this stagnation of the food in 
the stomach came from the family doctor, who 
reported that the husband had made the visit to 
the city an occasion for becoming uncontrollably 
drunk, and that he had by his escapades given his 
wife a night of turbulent anxiety. The second 
morning, after the woman had had a good rest, 
the gastric contents were again examined; the 
proper acidity was found, and the test breakfast 
had been normally digested and discharged." 

1 Ibid, p. 17. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 87 

Thus the story of the effect of pain and pleas- 
ure on digestion is one that is simply told, for the 
effects are direct and constant. The practical 
deductions are therefore so plain that he who 
runs may read, and yet unfortunately their plain- 
ness does not guarantee the reading. Their im- 
portance is, however, inconceivably great. Dear- 
born has aptly said that dyspepsia in the long run 
is more momentous than war. Year in and year 
out its destruction probably amounts to even 
more, and yet it is certain that a very large per 
cent, of its ravages could be eliminated by a rigid 
enforcement of the following rule : — Always 
force yourself to go without food rather than eat 
when annoyed, anxious, hurried, or in severe pain. 

Efficacious as this simple regime would undoubt- 
edly be, it is amazingly hard to put into effect in 
everyday life. One of the many things that die 
hard is the illusion that having eaten means being 
fed. A safety first campaign directed toward dis- 
pelling this illusion would rank in public service 
with any of the welfare movements which social 
workers have fostered. The business men's 
luncheon is probably the meal at which the soul 
is most consumed along with the food. If soul- 



88 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

gnawing is a necessary feature of noon life in a 
metropolis then a glass of water is the ideal lunch- 
eon of the future. Perhaps an increased skill in 
relaxation may be made to save the day, but if not, 
the alternative is plain. 

The relation between pain and digestion will 
serve to make clear one further point. The readi- 
ness of the neurasthenic to find in his stomach a 
prolific source of trouble can hardly be a matter of 
surprise. Whatever the original character of his 
difficulty, fancied or real, it would take no great 
amount of disagreeable thinking to have a sub- 
stantial effect in thwarting digestion. When eat- 
ing proceeds under these conditions the way to 
real trouble is not far ahead. What per cent, of 
dyspepsia is " nervous " it is difficult to say, but 
it can be readily seen that there is practically no 
limit to the power of pleasantly or unpleasantly 
toned ideas to further or hinder the assimilation 
of food. 

Effects on Circulation 

It is the circulation which immediately avails 
us of whatever vital resources we have. And as 
pain always means that conflict is on in real earn- 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



89 



est, it necessarily carries with it a hurry up call 
for activity of the circulation in special directions. 
In the interest of making mighty efforts, it is nec- 




Fig. s, A. 
Hemobarogram B 1 2. Woman, 19. The tenth minute shows a pleasure- 
anticipation fall beginning; this went on for five minutes, the 
systolic falling 28 millimeters, the diastolic falling quickly 4 milli- 
meters then rising slightly in what is practically a plateau. This 
girl volunteered a report of long training in repression of the un- 
pleasant for the sake of euphoria — happiness-training such as the 
" ' new ' thought " inculcates. In the 24th minute the memory of an 
unpleasant experience (involving some little difficulty) very quickly 
raised both the systolic and the diastolic and disturbed the vasomotor 
apparatus so much that all sounds forthwith disappeared for 6 min- 
utes, and the diastolic sounds mostly for 15 minutes. The two 
heart-counts were 92. 

essary that the slow nutritive processes, which have 
gradually furnished us our strength, are held in 
complete abeyance. The body is on a war foot- 



QO 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



ing, and every energy is bent to the quick mobi- 
lization of reserves. When nations are at war 
play grounds become places for drill, school 
houses are converted into hospitals, the lion's 
share of the food is withheld from the civil popu- 




Fig. 5, B. 
Hemobarogram B 2 13. Woman, 22. The first half of this hemo- 
barogram shows the marked rise in both pressures from the memory, 
most unpleasant, of a gastric ulcer a year before. The fall during 
a heart-examination is noteworthy. In the second half of the 
graph (24th minute) further anxiety over her aortic incompetency 
caused another rise. The heart-rate at first was 72 and at last 84. 

lation to be rushed to the soldiers at the front, and 
the conservative industrial plants that bring ma- 
terial prosperity in peace, are converted into 
munition factories operating night and day. The 
nation is none the richer for all of this, but it is 
in a position to instantly consume its wealth in a 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 91 

way favorable to its military intentions. Just so 
the body, when in extreme pain, foregoes in- 
stantly all the vegetative life which has slowly 
built it up, and gives itself to the task of drawing 
out all its latent power for use in one effort. 

The chief recruiting officer of the body, to fol- 
low the military analogy further, has been discov- 
ered to be an insignificantly small gland, and one 
which until very recently was not thought to have 
any importance. The adrenal gland, located in 
the upper end of the kidney, has now been made 
famous by the work of Biedl, Dreyer, Elliott and 
especially Cannon. It is now known that ad- 
renalin, the secretion of this gland, is produced 
by pain, bodily distress, or by any exciting emo- 
tion, including violent pleasures as well; and that 
it has a most remarkable variety of effects which 
help to render the blood instantly available and 
the muscular system ready for supreme effort. 
As soon as discharged into the blood it quickens 
the heart action, and causes a change in the con- 
striction of the arteries of such a sort that all of 
the inner organs except the heart and lungs are 
deprived of their blood, whereas there is an enor- 
mous increase of blood supply to the limbs and 



9 2 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

surface muscles. It brings it about that the liver 
releases extra stores of sugar, and thus gives extra 
food to the muscle cells which are thereby sup- 
plied for strenuous action. But most remarkable 
of all is the fact that it causes the blood to have 
a much quicker coagulation time than normal. 
This latter change is obviously of great advantage 
as a protection against mortal injury. The ani- 
mal in great pain, and therefore secreting ad- 
renalin, is actually better prepared for the heal- 
ing of wounds, if it should receive them. 

A further effect of having the circulation laden 
with adrenalin is that breathing is rendered easier. 
This is because the smooth muscle of the air tubes 
becomes relaxed so that the great inrush of air 
does not have to encounter contracted bronchioles. 
By this effect adrenalin brings it about that breath- 
ing does not become excessively labored even in 
supreme exertion. 

Lastly, adrenalin gives to tired muscle the 
equivalent of rest. The injection of one cubic cen- 
timeter of adrenin has in fact been found to cause 
a recovery of from fifty to seventy-five per cent, 
efficiency in a fatigued muscle. This striking ad- 
vantage enables the organism to continue the 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 93 

struggle far beyond its ordinary powers, and it is 
hence not to be marveled at that a man frenzied 
with excitement seems to double or treble his 
strength. 

This great number of advantageous reactions 
resulting from pain might have led us to the point 
of believing that pain was after all an excellent 
thing for the body. But let it be remembered 
that we are discussing the extra supplies drawn 
out in answer to excessive demands. When this 
mobilization proceeds moderately, as it does in 
response to active pleasure, the ultimate effect is 
tonic. But in pain the body is on an emergency 
basis and excessively so. The war debt will have 
to be paid when peace is declared. Then it will 
be discovered that the exchequer has been ser- 
iously depleted. When the object of tremendous 
struggle has been removed from the scene, we are 
left with depressed bodily states — slowed heart 
action, lowered blood pressure, and the inertia 
from digestive organs that have been violently 
put out of commission. It is this latter condition 
which is the real effect of pain. Unpleasantness 
evokes it directly without the temporary phase of 
excitement. It offers no definite deed to perform, 



94 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

but leaves us to settle down at once to the depres- 
sion which all things painful sooner or later bring 
about. The definiteness with which this depres- 
sion of the body can be accomplished by means of 
depressive ideas has often been demonstrated ex- 
perimentally. When a group of seventeen medi- 
cal students were given milk-sugar pills, and in- 
formed that they had taken a new kind of cardiac 
depressant, thirteen of the number responded with 
a slower heart beat. Little wonder that the doc- 
tor should use such studious care to prevent any- 
thing resembling an atmosphere of gloom in his 
vicinity ! The personal impression created by his 
presence is as potent a factor in producing sub- 
stantial physical effects as are most of the med- 
icines he is called on to administer. 

Summary 

In making any general statement in regard to 
the bodily effects of pain and pleasure it is neces- 
sary to keep continually in mind the difference be- 
tween immediate and final effects of pain, and the 
difference in effect of the moderate and of the 
violent pleasures. Confining ourselves to the con- 
sideration of the: immediate effects of pain and of 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 95 

moderate pleasure we noted the following signifi- 
cant facts: Pain impedes digestion in every par- 
ticular. It diminishes the secretion of saliva and 
of gastric juice, and delays the peristaltic contrac- 
tions. Its immediate effect on the circulation is 
to give an extra supply of blood to the limbs, 
heart and lungs at the expense of the digestive 
organs. Further results of pain are that the liver 
releases an unusual supply of blood-sugar, the 
blood is more disposed to coagulation, the muscles 
are less fatigable, and rapid breathing is made 
easier through the relaxation of the air tubes. 
The immediate bodily effects of moderate pleasure 
are as a rule directly opposed to those of pain. 



CHAPTER VI 

The Nervous Basis of Pain and 
Pleasure 

It is an accepted doctrine of modern psychology 
that every possible variation in mental life cor- 
responds to some variation in nervous condition. 
Psychology has been forced to accept this paral- 
lelism, partly because of the number of facts all 
pointing to the same conclusion, and partly be- 
cause the theory offers the most intelligible basis 
for explaining mental life in terms of cause and 
effect. 

The main facts that point to an intimate rela- 
tion between mind and brain are : 

(i) The fact that any injury to the brain al- 
ways means some loss of mental capacity. If the 
optic (second cranial) nerve is injured, the ability 
to see is either lost or impaired; likewise the in- 
variable connection of hearing with the eighth 
nerve has been certainly established; and so on for 

all of the twelve cranial nerves. 

96 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 97 

(2) w The fact that mental development always 
corresponds to brain development. The child's 
brain, like his mind, is much less developed than 
that of the man. Likewise the dog's brain falls 
far short of the man's in development; but for 
those mental abilities in which the dog surpasses 
man, as, for example, the sense of smell, there is 
a special brain part (the olfactory lobe), which 
is tremendously enlarged to correspond to his 
extra capacity. 

(3) The fact that by stimulating certain parts 
of the brain it is possible to produce definite re- 
actions. These reactions may be primarily motor, 
as when by applying a weak electric current to the 
Rolandic (upper central) part of a dog's brain, we 
succeed in producing now a movement of the front 
legs, now a wagging of the tail, now a barking. 
Again the effects may be sensory, as when we ob- 
serve that in exploring the skin with a warm, 
pointed cylinder, as often as the area touched cor- 
responds to the location of a certain kind of nerve 
ending (corpuscle of Ruffini) under the skin, we 
are aware of the sensation of warmth. 

Always and everywhere the story has been the 
same; more and more special nervous facts are 




Figs. 6 and 7. 1 — Fig. 6 at the left shows the general relations of the 
central nervous system to the bones of the skull and spine. Figure 
7, at the right, displays the general contours of the central system 
as seen from in front. The great ganglionated cord of the sympa- 
thetic system is shown attached to one side of the spinal^ nerves; 
the other side has been cut away. Cer., the cerebral hemispheres; 
O, the olfactory centers; M, the medulla oblongata; Cb., the cere- 
bellum; Sp.C, the spinal cord; I, the olfactory nerve; II, the optic 
nerve; VIII, the auditory nerve; C, the first cervical spinal nerve; 
Dx t the first dorsal, or thoracic, nerve; L±, the first lumbar nerve; Si, 
the first sacral nerve. (From Angell's Psychology, Courtesy Henry 
Holt & Co.) 



98 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 99 

being found to have an invariable connection with 
certain special mental facts. The advance of 
physiological psychology in this direction has been 
of a sort to justify ambitious hopes for the future. 
" No psychosis (mental activity) without neurosis 
(nervous activity)" has been the slogan, and the 
supposition has been that finding the particular 
neurosis for every particular psychosis is only a 
matter of time and more detailed progress. 

It must be admitted, however, that pain and 
pleasure are not to be numbered among the con- 
spicuous conquests of physiological psychology up 
to date. Indeed it may be said that it is even yet 
something of a moot point whether pain impulses 
ever reach the brain proper, or whether they stop 
just short of the cerebral hemispheres. The de- 
tails regarding the distribution of pain nerves are 
likewise far from being satisfactorily made out, 
although much careful work has been done along 
this line. 

,The best evidence as to the brain-center for 
pain and pleasure, points to the so-called " optic 
thalamus " as being most directly concerned. If, 
for simplicity's sake, we picture the brain as 
formed of a top, middle and lower story, we may 




i$yfi 



Fig. 8. — Showing schematically the ascending and descending tracts 
between cord and cortex. Impulses of pain transmitted from the 
skin to the spinal cord by way of C or D, ascend the sensory 
columns in the cord, and crossing over to G arrive at the thalamus, 
H. The cerebral hemispheres lie above. (From Pillsbury's 
" Fundamentals of Psychology," Courtesy the Macmillan Co.) 



IOO 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 101 

think of the thalamus as an important part of the 
middle story. Above it lie the cerebral hemis- 
pheres which, as is well known, subserve all of 
the special sensations but pain, and all of the 
imagery and association of ideas which go to make 
up our perception, memory, imagination and 
thought. In short, this upper story may be said 
to be the seat of sheer intellect and of deliberate 
control. But it is a feelingless part of the brain. 
Destruction to it is not marked by any change in 
the painful or pleasant aspects of things. The 
expression " cold intellectuality " seems appro- 
priate to all of those phases of our mental life in 
which this upper brain level is primarily at work. 
If one finds a supreme virtue in knowing all things 
and suffering nothing, he must believe the need of 
the race is in more and more cerebral activity at 
the expense of activity of the lower brain centers. 
Considerably below the thalamus lie the med- 
ulla and cerebellum, the lower story of the brain. 
Together with the spinal cord, these centers make 
it possible for us to perform those acts which are 
most necessary for our bodily existence. A frog 
deprived of all but these three centers is still able 
to breathe, swallow, swim, turn over from his 



102 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



back, and make defensive movements in protec- 
tion of his body when touched, but all of these 
activities seem to proceed automatically. Every 
object is, for him, only a space-occupying mass, 




FlG. g. — Showing the middle and lower brain, th, thalamus; ps, pm, 
pi, are superior, middle, and inferior peduncles of the cerebellum, 
which may itself be seen, in part cut away and drawn to one side. 
(After Wundt. From Pillsbury's " Fundamentals of Psychology," 
Courtesy the Macmillan Co.) 

and not a something to call forth an attitude of 
like or dislike. 

It is the middle story of the brain, containing 
the thalamus, which seems to furnish the special 
conditions of painful and pleasurable sensibility. 
When this part of the brain is injured, one of the 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 103 

most conspicuous results is a great exaggeration 
of painful sensibility. After injury to the lateral 
zone of the thalamus, according to Herrick, 1 
" acute, persistent, paroxysmal pains are always 
present, often intolerable and yielding to no 
analgesic treatment. There is also a tendency to 
react excessively to unpleasant stimuli." Even 
tickling becomes very unpleasant, but the pleas- 
ure from moderate warmth is increased. It 
appears then that when the thalamus through 
injury is somewhat isolated from the controlling 
activity of the cortex (top story), the result is a 
free play to its affective (feeling) activity. Both 
pleasure and pain become unrestrained and there 
is a consequent overloading of all sensations with 
an exaggerated feeling-tone. In these facts we 
find a neurological basis for the ancient distinction 
between mind and heart, for now it may be said 
that a man thinks with his cerebral hemispheres 
(top story), feels with his thalamus (middle 
story) , and with his lower brain centers performs 
the machine-like acts which are regularly neces- 
sary to his very existence. It is evident that a 
well-rounded life, abounding in complex and 

1 Herrick, C. J., " Introduction to Neurology," 1916. 



io 4 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

refined sentiments, rests on numerous inter-con- 
nections between the thalamus and the cortex. 
For it is the elaboration of connections in the 
cerebrum which gives crude feeling the basis for 
discrimination and thus lays the foundation for a 
critical appreciation of the things that please or 
displease. Culture and real artistic feeling are 
marked by the presence of this higher intellectual- 
ity in the things of the heart. But if the thalamus 
profits by its cortical connections, it renders value 
received in supplying the emotional drive without 
which mere intellectuality becomes arid and bar- 
ren. [The pedant who, for all his learning, has 
no live interests, the prodigy of theory lacking 
utterly the glow of practical enthusiasms, the 
calculating schemer whose reptilian selfishness is 
unrelieved by any generous warmth, these are men 
whose cerebral organization (top story) has in a 
measure parted company with its thalamic found- 
ation and naturally, when weighed in the balance 
by their fellows, they are found wanting. 

The connections of pain and pleasure in the 
nervous system outside the brain, have not been 
at all clearly made out except for surface pain and 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 105 

for tickling. Pleasantness and unpleasantness, it 
is generally agreed, are not to be referred to any- 
particular nerves but depend on the kind of nerv- 
ous discharge that is produced when any given 
nerves are called into activity. Pleasantness, for 
example, may result equally well from a stimula- 
tion of the nerves of taste or of smell, of hearing, 
or of vision. It is not the specific nerve but the 
character of the discharge that makes the dif- 
ference between pleasantness and unpleasantness. 
A great variety of hypotheses have been advanced 
as to what it is about the nervous impulse that 
makes the difference. Perhaps the most widely 
discussed of these theories has been the one 
advanced by Marshall in his " Pleasure, Pain and 
^Esthetics, " and recently restated in his later work 
entitled " Consciousness.'' Briefly stated, his 
view is that any nervous activity is pleasant, if it 
involves the use of surplus stored force; it is 
unpleasant whenever the energy demanded by the 
activity is greater than the amount which is readily 
available. In other words, pleasantness means 
that we are spending our surplus; unpleasantness, 
that we are drawing on our reserve. If a man 



106 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

who has sat all day in a train enjoys getting out 
and walking briskly up the street, that is because 
the energy consumed in walking comes out of the 
abundance of the surplus which he has gradually 
stored up during his ride. If, after miles of such 
walking, he begins to find it unpleasant, the reason 
is that, having consumed his surplus, he begins 
after a time to find that the energy demanded by 
this activity is greater in amount than that which 
he can produce without drawing on his general 
reserve. The author of this theory has adduced 
many strong arguments in its support, but it has 
seemed to most psychologists that pleasure must 
rest on a more stable nervous condition than the 
mere burning up of a surplus — a process which 
it is hard to think of as drawn out in time, whereas 
any given pleasure may show a very considerable 
length of life. Moreover, the fact that pleasure 
is usually keenest where the issue of a conflict is 
most in the balance, is one which is difficult to 
interpret in terms of surplus energy consumption. 
The difference between just winning and just being 
defeated is as wide as the two poles, but the 
energy-depletion of the loser may not be conspicu- 
ously greater than that of the victor. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 107 

The more recent theory of Max Meyer * is that 
11 the correlate of pleasantness and unpleasantness 
is the increase or decrease of the intensity of a 
previously constant current, if the increase or 
decrease is caused by a force acting at a point 
other than the point of sensory stimulation." In 
other words, when a given nervous discharge is 
heightened by a sudden access of energy, we get 
pleasantness ; when it is diminished by interference, 
we get unpleasantness. 2 " Imagine," says Profes- 
sor Meyer, " you are interested in the presidential 
election. You have heard the dinner-bell and are 
rising from your chair. The cover of a magazine 
strikes your eyes, on which you read the title of 
an article on candidates for the presidency. This 
interferes with your walking to the dining-room 
and you experience a brief unpleasantness. . . . 
While you are reading the paper, every stimula- 
tion of your sense organs other than the sight of 
the printed pages is unable to reach its motor end, 
but must join and increase the intensity of the 
process of reading because of your acquired 
capacity for reacting strongly upon words and 

1 Max Meyer, " The Nervous Correlate of Pleasantness and 
Unpleasantness," Psychological Review, 1908, p. 307. 

2 Max Meyer, op. cit., 317. 



108 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

sentences which have the meaning of politics. 
According to our theory you experience pleasant- 
ness. Thus we see that an acquired capacity of 
attention can result in unpleasantness at the 
moment when attention begins and must result 
in pleasantness as long as attention in the same 
direction continues.'' Concentration of nervous 
energy appears in this theory as the physical basis 
of pleasantness, dissipation of energy corresponds 
to unpleasantness. It is the familiar contrast 
between easy working attention to what interests 
us, and the painful inability to collect our scattered 
thoughts when we find ourselves flying off at a 
tangent as one distraction succeeds another. 
Pleasure means nervous efficiency, not the effi- 
ciency of an overfed nerve-cell consuming its 
stored-up surplus, but that of a whole system of 
nerves converging on the accomplishment of an 
end. The detailed working out of this theory 
would lead us beyond the limits of the present 
discussion, but it is evident that it lends itself to 
a wide range of application. The last word that 
can be said at present is only conjecture. Only 
this much seems reasonably established — that the 
nervous basis of pleasantness and unpleasantness 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 109 

is to be looked for rather in the general mode of 
functioning of the whole nervous system than in 
the specific properties of any special set of nerves. 

Bodily distress and gratification appear to 
depend on the working of the special nervous 
system that supplies the abdominal cavity. [This 
system, the so-called autonomic, is made up prin- 
cipally of three great plexuses of nerve centers — 
the cranial, the solar, and the sacral plexus. It 
has long been known that a blow delivered at the 
solar plexus (in the pit of the stomach) would 
result in acute bodily distress, if not in actual col- 
lapse. Xhis blow has always been a favorite 
resource of the prize-fighter, who, without making 
any pretence at a knowledge of the anatomical 
reasons connected with the " knock out," has 
nevertheless guided the delivery of his blow with 
the certainty born of much experience. 

It is only quite recently that anything approach- 
ing a detailed knowledge of the autonomic nervous 
system has been worked out, and plausibility still 
has to take the place of proof when any general 
statement is offered as to its method of operation, 
but there is not a little evidence that points to the 
" sympathetic " nerves (those which connect the 



no 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 



region of the solar plexus with the spinal cord) , 
as the conductors of inner bodily pains. It has 
been observed, for example, in cases of syringom- 
yelia — a disease of the spinal cord — that when 
the injury to the cord occurs at a lower level than 
the entry of the " sympathetic " connections, 
bodily pains continue to be felt. But when the 




*-m. 



Fig. io. — Cross section of skin. hi. horny layer of epidermis; ne, 
nerve endings; nt, nerve trunks, leading to spinal cord. (From 
Angell's " Psychology," Courtesy Henry Holt & Co.) 

spinal injury occurs at a point higher than the 
fifth or sixth dorsal segment of the cord, that is, 
high enough to interfere with the central connec- 
tions of the " sympathetic " nerves, no bodily 
pains are felt. 

The nerve apparatus for surface pain and for 
tickling has been much more satisfactorily made 
out. Careful exploration of the skin with very 



PAIN AND PLEASURE in 

delicate hair points has afforded evidence of the 
existence of special pain spots which yield upon 
stimulation a pointed wiry sensation different from 
that of pressure or of temperature. These spots 
number from ioo to 200 per square centimeter, 
and their localization seems to correspond to that 
of the free nerve endings in the epidermis. 
Where the skin is lacking in this type of nerve 
ending it is insensitive to pain, as, for example, 
on the inside of the cheek, where the membranous 
covering can be bitten or pricked without causing 
more than the inconvenience of an abrasion. 
Where, on the other hand, this type of nerve is 
the only one to be found in a given area, the only 
sensation quality that can be obtained is that of 
pain. This is true of the cornea of the eye and 
of the tooth pulps. Contact with the " nerve " of 
a tooth is not felt as pressure, but only as pain. 

[The pain nerves, although arranged in a 
separate system, are so intimately connected with 
the other nerves of the skin that any excessive 
stimulation of the senses of pressure or of temper- 
ature readily overflows into the pain channels, and 
the result is a painful quality, over and above that 
of the special sense in question. Thus very hot 




Fig. ii. — Nerve endings in skin and about hair follicles. The free 
nerve endings, — "pain spots" are just below the skin hsi. (From 
Pillsbury's " Fundamentals of Psychology," Courtesy the Mac- 
millan Co.) 



112 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 113 

water feels both hot and painful; intense pressure 
feels both heavy and painful, and so on for prac- 
tically all of the senses. It is as if pain had been 
only gradually differentiated from the other 
senses; in spite of its recently evolved special 
nervous machinery, it remains bound to the service 
of the older neurone systems, a sort of collateral 
pathway excited by excesses in the adjoining 
channels. 

The pain fibers, on reaching the spinal cord, 
cross to the opposite side, and, ascending directly 
up the gray matter of the cord to the thalamus, 
they form the pain tract of the cord. " Injury to 
this path in the human body may cause complete 
insensitivity to both superficial and deep pain on 
the opposite side of the body below the site of 
injury, without loss of general tactile sensibility." * 
When the injury to this path has been only suffi- 
cient to dull and not destroy the functioning of the 
nerves, the result is that all pain becomes reduced 
to an itching. Experiments by Dr. Thole, a 
German physiologist, show that when the spinal 
cord of a patient is anaesthetized, there is a cer- 

1 C. Judson Herrick, " Introduction to Neurology," Philadel- 
phia, 1916, p. 251. 



ii 4 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

tain stage at which the patient will report that the 
pricking of a needle doesn't hurt, but itches. This 
is in accord with the fact that when the pain spots 
on the skin are very weakly stimulated, the result 
is an itching sensation which may be indifferent or 
even mildly pleasant, especially when scratching 
ensues. The sense of tickle shares the same 
nerves as the pressure sense. The end organs in 
the skin, which function for this sense, are there- 
fore the bulbs at the roots of the hairs and, in 
the hairless regions of the skin, the corpuscles of 
Meissner. From these end organs, communica- 
tion proceeds to the spinal cord and thence 
upward, by way of the special path for touch in 
the spinal lemniscus. It is possible for an injury 
to this path to take place in such fashion that a 
normal impulse of touch, such as pressure on the 
finger, merely tickles. It has been observed that 
when the spinal cord is anaesthetized, the gradual 
stages of deterioration in the functioning of the 
touch nerves is marked by first the loss of tickle, 
then of light touch, then of the sensation from 
solid contact. Tickling therefore appears as a 
partially effective pressure, which drops out when 
the nerve is considerably reduced in efficiency. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 115 

This accords with the fact that it is our sensitivity 
to extremely light touch that renders us ticklish 
under normal conditions. 

In passing it may be noted that there is con- 
siderable evidence to the effect that the surface of 
the body has evolved more than one kind of sys- 
tem of nerve terminals. Head * has found evi- 
dence of as many as three separate systems, which 
he has called the systems of protopathic, epicritic, 
and deep sensibility, but inasmuch as the exact 
functioning of these separate systems is an obscure 
point, we must leave it with only passing mention. 

Summary 

We have seen that the most primitive kind of 
pleasure and pain is probably pleasantness and 
unpleasantness. Corresponding to this we have 
found that the nervous basis of pleasantness and 
unpleasantness is not a specially evolved system of 
nerves, but some characteristic of nervous impulses 
in general. The more special states of bodily 
distress and gratification seem to have a particular 
connection with the autonomic nervous system, 
which forms such a conspicuous feature of the 

1 Head, Rivers, and Sherren, op. cit. 



n6 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

inner body. Surface pain and tickling are seen 
to depend on the distribution of special nerves 
throughout the skin. These nerves group them- 
selves into very definite paths in the spinal cord 
and communicate finally with the thalamus of the 
brain, which is the center at which all variations 
of our affective (feeling) life are brought to a 
focus. 



CHAPTER VII 

The Diagnostic Value of Pain 

" Where does it hurt you?" is generally the 
physician's first question. To be sure there are 
exceptional diseases in this respect, such as typhoid, 
scarlet fever, and malaria, in which local pain 
plays no part; there is also the well-known fact 
that just before death even the most painful 
diseases tend to become painless; but these few 
exceptions do not seriously affect the general 
statement that the pains reported by the patient 
are the physician's main reliance in all depart- 
ments of diagnosis. And it is just for this reason 
thaf the physician's first care must be to satisfy 
himself as to the extent to which the patient's 
statement of the case can be accepted at face value. 
The thousands of over-tender sufferers, who daily 
pour out their exaggerated tale of woe, have done 
much to encourage a widespread belief in the 
unreality of all pain; and there is no gainsaying 

117 



n8 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

the fact that a very considerable per cent, of 
reported pain is unreal in the sense that it prob- 
ably has its basis not in serious organic lesion, but 
in morbidly directed attention to petty bodily dis- 
orders, which would pass unnoticed by a person 
of more robust nervous constitution. On this 
account the physician must in some measure 
diagnose the patient's mental tendencies before he 
can commit himself to a judgment regarding his 
physical condition. 

The ease with which M imaginary" pain might 
be induced in a suggestible person can be readily 
seen in an illusion experiment which has been 
devised for a sense very closely related to pain, 
that of warmth. The subject is asked to hold in 
his hand a coil of German-silver wire, which seems 
to have some connection with four tungsten lamps, 
which give when lighted a powerful illumination, 
and he is told to expect the wire to become warm 
whenever he sees the lights turned on. Actually 
the wire will not become warm unless a secret 
switch underneath the box has been closed. The 
experimenter can operate this switch noiselessly 
without the subject's knowledge, and without in 
any way affecting the illumination of the lamps 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 119 

which seem to be the real source of the heat. 
Many subjects, under these circumstances, will 
readily report that they feel the glow of warmth 
every time they see the powerful tungsten lights 
snapped on. Such subjects may be safely classi- 
fied as over-suggestible, and their false report in 
regard to the experience of warmth, which demon- 
strably had no objective cause, leaves a strong 
presumption that if their report had referred to 
pain, for which the objective facts are difficult of 
access, the situation would be one to bafHe an inex- 
pert diagnostician. 

We have seen that the simplest general way 
to picture painfulness was as a struggle in which 
the organism puts up a losing fight. In the case 1 
of the " imaginary " pains the battle may be lost 
in one of two ways. It may be either through too 
much attention to the disturbance, or through too 
little resistance to it. In the former case we 
have the pains of psychasthenia, in the latter 
those of neurasthenia. [The psychasthenic will 
describe with a smile on his face the darting pains 
he felt a short time ago, when it seemed as if knife 

1 See C. L. Dana, " The Interpretation of Pain and the 
Dyesthesias," Jour. Am. Med. Assoc, lvi, No. n, 787. 



120 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

blades were sticking in his knees. The memory 
of his pain brings with it no painfullness, because 
his original pain was due to a slight irritation 
which was morbidly enlarged by his attention. As 
soon as his attention is diverted, all trace of pain 
disappears. The neurasthenic is more likely to 
bring back his disorder as he describes it. His 
excessive weakness and irritability bring it about 
that a very slight reference to his headaches and 
backaches is sufficient to reinstate the moans that 
his tired heart and underfunctioning digestive 
system make only too easy for him. 

Whenever a physician is called upon to deal 
with cases where there is reason to suspect the 
patient's ability to give a genuine account of his 
pains, he is likely to be guided by some two or 
three supplementary criteria which are useful in 
this connection. He watches the facial expression 
while testing the supposedly sensitive part. 
Usually the neuropathic patient, under such cir- 
cumstances, fails in spite of his extreme state- 
ments, to show anything like the anxiety of expres- 
sion that normal pain impresses on the faces of 
real sufferers. Another criterion is the fluctuation 
of blood pressure during a paroxysm of pain. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 121 

This index, however, is far less certain than that 
of the sympathetic reflex in the pupil of the eye. 
A clear dilatation of the pupil is convincing evi- 
dence that real pain is being felt. When a long 
past history of pain is complained of, it is useful 
to know also whether the loss of weight was con- 
siderable during that period, for the regular effect 
of long continued pain is a loss of bodily weight. 
When it has been ascertained that the patient is 
to be regarded as trustworthy in his account of 
himself, the next great possibility of error lies in 
the fact that there are many pains of the sort 
known as referred pains. That is, the physical 
seat of trouble may be in one place and the pain 
be felt as located in a quite different part of the 
body. The pain may be transferred to the other 
side of the body, as when a patient with appendi- 
citis sometimes feels nothing hurting him except 
on the left side. Much more frequent are the 
references up and down the body. For example, 
in one case of pain in the knee caused by a corn 
on the toe, the diagnosis was erroneously made 
and an operation was advised for loose cartilage 
in the knee. 1 But the fact that the patient felt 

1 See Rudolph Schmidt, "Pain," Philadelphia, 1911, p. 3546*. 



122 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

the pains only when he wore boots or shoes finally 
gave the clue to their referred character. A still 
more curious instance is one in which pressure on 
a mole on the foot caused pain to be felt in the 
groin. Cases of downward reference are also of 
frequent occurrence, as when pain is felt in the 
leg as a result of tubercular disease in the spine, or 
when pain is felt in the little finger as a result of 
pressure on the ulnar nerve from a growth on the 
first rib. 

In the head, the ear is a frequent repository of 
the troubles of other parts, as when an irritated 
lower tooth or tonsil causes a referred earache; 
and headache itself is the one form of pain which 
more than any other calls for taking account of 
the most remote bodily areas as disease centers. 
.Thus there is the well-known headache from con- 
stipation or dyspepsia, 1 which disappears as soon 
as the stomach and intestine take up their normal 
functioning. In women the paths which lead to 
pain in the head are even more various than in 
men. Cases are recorded where habitual head- 
aches disappeared after marriage or after the 

1 See R. J. Behan, "Pain: Its Origin, Conduction, Perception 
and Diagnostic Significance," New York, 1916. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 123 

birth of the first child, or as the result of some 
adjustment which had apparently not the remotest 
connection with the nerves of the head. 

The greatest advance toward a systematic 
interpretation of referred pains was made through 
the researches of Head. He explained as fol- 
lows the cases where internal organs affect definite 
areas of the skin. The diseased internal organ 
sends up its impulses to the appropriate segment 
in the spinal cord, and here the impulse, instead of 
keeping to its path, spreads itself diffusely into the 
near-lying fibers of the same segment. In sq 
doing it may excite those fibers that supply areas 
of the skin from this particular spinal segment, 
and the result is that the skin sensation, being much 
more highly developed and accurately localized 
than visceral sensation, arrogates to itself the 
pain, and we feel as if hurt on the surface of the 
skin although injured inside the body. 

To put the matter more simply, referred pain 
means that there has been a crossing of " wires " 
somewhere along the line, and in order to inter- 
pret it satisfactorily, it is necessary to know what 
are the possibilities of such crossing, i. e., what 
are the nervous impulses that come into near con- 



124 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

tact in the same spinal segments or elsewhere. 
Head's work has done much toward clearing up 
this point. He has shown, for example, how a 
painful area in the temporal region of the head 
may be associated with impulses from the heart, 
lungs, or stomach; and how the area at the back 
of the head might be especially connected with 
the liver or intestine. Each organ within the 
head also has its maximum points of referred pain. 
For example, when the retina is involved, the 
crown of the head may be affected. But in spite 
of the exercise of the most careful study, we may 
well imagine that baffling cases of this sort will be 
constantly arising. One instance is recorded in 
which a woman, suffering apparently from the 
bronchial tubes, visited specialist after specialist, 
all to no purpose. One day by chance there was 
discovered in the outer ear a large plug of wax, 
and with its removal the coughing and irritation of 
the throat at once subsided. 

The two great sources of error in the diagnosis 
of pain we have seen to be the imaginativeness of 
nervous patients, and the referred character of 
many pains in normal patients. Reasonable 
allowance being made for these two sources of 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 125, 

error, he bases his diagnosis of pain mainly on 
three criteria — location, time of occurrence, and 
influences that modify the pain. " Where does 
it hurt you?" " When does it hurt you?" 
" Under what conditions does it hurt you most and 
least?" L These are the questions the answers to 
which make possible the intelligent interpretation 
of pains. 

Location 

Easiest to judge on this basis are the pains in 
the joints. The typical joint pain is clearly 
defined and without any radiation. There are a 
few exceptions, such as the radiations from the 
ankle joint in flat foot, but in general it can be 
said of the joints that the hurt will coincide pretty 
exactly with the trouble. On the other hand, 
there are pains which by their very characteristic 
radiations give the clue to diagnosis. Thus head- 
aches that are due to too great intracranial pres- 
sure reach a maximum in the nape of the neck, 
and tend to radiate down the back, especially 
about the shoulder blades. When the seat of pain 
is inside the body, an important fact to ascertain 
is whether localization is confined to either the 
left or the right side. When both spontaneous 



126 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

pain and tenderness to pressure occur on the left 
side below the arch formed by the lower ribs, 
ulcer of the stomach most naturally comes to 
mind, although affections of the spleen, intestine, 
and even heart are not barred from possibility. 
If the pain is limited to the right side, the prob- 
abilities first suggested are disease of the gall- 
bladder, of the duodenum, the colon, etc. The 
tenderness from a diseased appendix is generally 
quite low down. 

Pains located in the shoulder are likewise of 
great suggestive value in sounding the condition of 
the inner organs. When a person of tuberculous 
appearance complains of shoulder pains, the 
physician at once has his attention directed to the 
pulmonary apices. When tuberculosis is out of 
the question, the next best guess is disease of the 
arteries, especially if the pain is increased by 
violent exertion, such as running up stairs. When 
the pain is of quite mild intensity, the probability 
is increased that the seat of inflammation is further 
down in the stomach, spleen, or liver, but in these 
cases there are usually other more pronounced 
local symptoms, so that the shoulder pain is only 
an incident in the diagnosis. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 127 

The above instances, taken somewhat at random 
from the vast amount of topographical detail that 
concerns the subject of pain, serve to indicate the 
delicacy of art that the physician must bring to his 
scientific knowledge in order to interpret his data 
rightly. 

Time of Occurrence 

Although the time of occurrence has a much 
more limited significance than the facts just dis- 
cussed, it is of considerable importance to know 
what is the relation of a patient's pains to the 
hours of eating, and also to know whether the 
acutest attacks occur by day or by night. Thus 
pyloric colic has the regular characteristic that the 
afternoon attack begins two to three hours after 
the midday meal. 1 " At this time the expulsion 
of the gastric contents through the narrowed 
pylorus, or an attempt at this, takes place. Gas- 
tric rigidity sets in, and gurgling sounds are 
audible, while gas is belched up and there are 
eructations of sour fluid. Large quantities of 
indigestible food cause delay in the onset of the 
pain, but increase its severity. The attacks often 

1 Rudolph Schmidt, op. cit., p. 179. 



128; PAIN AND PLEASURE 

last from two to three hours, and are ordinarily 
terminated by the onset of copious vomiting." 

A much larger group of pains is characterized 
by onset at night. In the greatest per cent, of 
cases the pain of ulcer is nocturnal, the paroxysms 
occurring anywhere from eleven to one o'clock, 
and the pain lasting until the early morning. In 
general, colicky pains are most apt to be man- 
ifested during the midnight hours. Pains con- 
nected with the disease of syphilis have their onset 
regularly at night. The " nervous " headache of 
which the syphilitic in the secondary or tertiary 
stages complains is by far more common at night. 
Non-occurrence at that time almost justifies the 
rejection of syphilis as the cause. In addition, 
neuralgic pains, and most of the gastric seizures 
in general, are characteristically night pains. 
The fact of night onset for all of this group gives 
to the physician an additional means of determin- 
ing the extent to which the patient is misled by his 
subjective feelings. The probability is that if the 
disturbance is sufficient to wake him out of his 
midnight sleep, the cause is a very substantial one. 
If, on the other hand, a neuralgia is complained 
of, which is severe by day, but never troublesome 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 129 

at night, neuropathic condition of the patient is 
to that extent rendered more probable. 

Modifying Factors 

A peculiarity of all pain due to disorder in the 
circulatory apparatus is that any bodily motion 
tends to increase it. If a patient finds that the 
act of climbing stairs or of running for a car leaves 
him with a persistent pain in the back of the chest, 
it is the heart and arteries that we should naturally 
look to for the trouble. Motion of the body is a 
very useful index to abdominal disorders also, 
especially those in which the organs are congested, 
for in these cases any lifting, stooping, or bending 
back and forth is likely to increase pressure where 
there is already too much of it. " Pain in the 
neighborhood of the appendix," says Schmidt, 1 
11 is not rarely elicited in drawing on the shoes, lift- 
ing the head, bending the trunk, or sitting down, 
etc." Again, 2 " the jar communicated to the 
abdomen along the lower extremity on putting the 
foot to the ground may give rise to pain; for 
example, in the neighborhood of an inflamed 
appendix, a movable kidney." Naturally the dis- 

* R. Schmidt, op. cit. 2 R. Schmidt, op. cit. 



ijo PAIN AND PLEASURE 

orders of the organs of motion are most easily 
determined by direct motion of the parts them- 
selves. Pain resulting from very slow motion of 
a joint gives a strong presumption in favor of 
arthralgia. 

When motion proves to be of no especial conse- 
quence, it is often possible to be guided by the 
position of maximum pain. [Thus it has often 
been observed that when a patient with ulcer has 
a paroxysm of pain, the intensity can be varied 
greatly according as he lies on his face, back, or 
side. Patients with gastralgia are likely to find 
that lying on the right side increases their dis- 
comfort. It is almost as if they had forcibly 
moved the gastric contents across to that side. 
Colic pain is likewise made more acute by lying 
on the right side. Headache, when due to too 
great tension within the cranium, will be worst 
when the head is bent forward, and the greatest 
relief is to be had by bending the head backward 
as far as possible. This position seems to make 
for a diminution of the tension. 

The one modifying factor that best serves to 
localize pains and to point to the seat of disorder 
is pressure. Here alone is a whole field for 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 131 

diagnosis, and one which the physician with deft 
fingers makes peculiarly his own. The number 
of diagnoses that have been made possible by 
pulling and pushing the skin with occasional per- 
cussion, we can hardly hope to estimate, for ten- 
derness to pressure is an almost constant feature 
of all local inflammation. The most conspicuous 
single instance perhaps is the pain caused by 
pressure in the region of the appendix during the 
stage of abscess formation. The very pressure 
of the bed clothes at this time may cause the most 
extreme agony. It is often of great diagnostic 
importance to know whether the pain can be 
relieved by the administration of local anaesthe- 
tics. If cocaine relieves the discomfort, the 
indication is clear that the pain producing factor 
is local, not general; hence a previous suspicion of 
something like gastric ulcer would be in a large 
measure justified, if local anaesthesia for that part 
of the abdomen temporarily relieved the situation. 
The limits of our discussion have made it 
impossible to do more than barely outline the 
ways in which pain may be made serviceable in the 
interest of diagnosis, but enough has been said to 
make it clear that pain is by far the best instru- 



132 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

ment of the diagnostician. Other accompanying 
symptoms such as swelling, peculiar formations, 
noises from within, etc., all have their usefulness, 
but they are in themselves generally very insuffi- 
cient for an understanding of the nature of the 
disorder. The study of pain with especial 
emphasis on its location, time of occurrence, and 
conditions by which it can be increased or 
decreased — this is an indispensable support on 
which the physician must lean when taking counsel 
with himself as to how to proceed. When this 
fails him there is great probability of his being 
led astray. The writer knows a young man who, 
when a boy, had his appendix removed as the 
result of his falsified account of a pain in his side. 
He had stoutly maintained his statement before 
his parents and the doctor in order to free himself 
from the need of going back to school! 

Summary 

Pain is unquestionably the physician's most 
reliable dependence as a means of diagnosis, but 
it is necessary for him to have perpetually before 
him the possibility that a given pain may be 
" imaginary " (psychasthenic or neurasthenic) , or 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 133 

" referred " (giving a false indication as to the 
real source of the trouble). The former source 
of error he can in a measure guard against by 
tests of suggestibility, by noting the change of 
facial expression, of blood pressure and of the 
pupil reflex. It is only recently that anything like 
a systematic interpretation of referred pain has 
been begun. 

The three most important criteria on which to 
base a diagnosis from pain were seen to be the 
location, the time of occurrence, and the possible 
modifying factors, such as motion, position and 
pressure. 



CHAPTER VIII 

^Esthetic Pleasure 

We have seen that the fundamental condition of 
pleasure is to be found in the struggle which we 
as living beings are constantly waging against the 
environment. Whether pleasure comes in the 
successful waging of the actual conflict or in the 
restful accumulation of strength preparatory to 
new struggle, it always derives its significance 
from this one great fact of life. Any situation 
which is adapted for the staging of a successful 
conflict is therefore eminently suited for affording 
us pleasure, and the aesthetic situation is one 
which is peculiarly effective for just this reason. 
Detached from reality though it may be, the 
artistic setting is one which calls into play a variety 
of tendencies which struggle for expression and 
find it. " Unity in variety " is the definition which 
has probably been most often applied to beauty, 
and by this definition beauty is at once seen to 
involve the mastery of complexities by a mind 

134 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 135 

which delights in combining, which refuses to 
allow things to be discrete, and determines wher- 
ever possible to assemble the various parts of the 
world into something intelligible. Every strug- 
gling mind which, like Archimedes, has trium- 
phantly cried " Eureka ! n on the discovery of a 
solution which simplified the bewildering complex- 
ities against which it was pitted, has known the 
thrill of unmixed pleasure. 

" A theory is beautiful," says Stout, 1 " which 
brings under one point of view a multitude of facts 
previously dispersed without obvious bond of 
union; so that, instead of dissipating attention 
upon a loose aggregate, we can concentrate it 
upon a unified whole." The beauty and the 
pleasure in art are due to the fact that it supplies a 
multitude of detail that can be unified without 
undue strain. The more energetic and masterful 
the mind the more it will demand that the material 
of its art be really complex. Easy conquests 
afford it little satisfaction. A contrast between 
the art of the restless, self-assertive north Euro- 
pean and that of the milder and more indolent 
south European bears out this point strikingly. 

1 Stout, op. cit., p. 283. 



i 3 6 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

Gehring in his suggestive book entitled " Racial 
Contrasts,'' has pointed out in some detail the 
remarkable difference between the art which satis- 
fies the Italian and that which satisfies the Nordic 
mind. In the music of the former we find chiefly 
emphasized the simple melody sung by the voice 
and repeated only as an encore. In the music of 
northern Europe the dominating interest is not in 
the single melody but in involved counterpoint, in 
which several parts go their independent ways ; it 
is not in the voice but in the orchestra ; not in the 
aria but in the leitmotif which recurs in a variety 
of contexts, and helps to weave together the mean- 
ing of the whole opera. The comparison of the 
work of Rossini, Donizzetti, Verdi and Puccini 
with that of Bach, Beethoven, Wagner and 
Strauss certainly gives justification to sweeping 
statement. In literature the same distinction 
holds. Over against the simple charm of style 
which the Italian or French writer derives from 
the orderly arrangement of material which is not 
extremely involved, we have the elaborate, and 
even heavy, literary expression of the German and 
Englishman. The language itself is involved and 
lavish in figures of speech; but most marked is the 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 137 

penchant for building up infinitely complex literary 
structures. Instead of the simple observance of 
the dramatic unities of time, place and action, we 
find Shakespeare introducing thirty-four charac- 
ters in " Julius Caesar," and keeping up three plots 
in "The Merchant of Venice"; we find Goethe 
employing two hundred individual speakers in 
11 Faust," and leading the action through all ages 
and all parts of the universe. The English and 
German novels, too, attempt to bring together 
into a unity a large number of comparatively dis- 
connected threads of interest, so that by the end 
of the book if the reader has succeeded in bring- 
ing his various interests through to a solution he 
has shown himself capable of no little synthesis. 
In painting, again, as in music and literature, the 
south European is satisfied with much simpler 
effect. In the Italian paintings graceful figures 
exquisitely colored are grouped symmetrically 
about a single center. In the Flemish and Ger- 
man paintings there is an extraordinary elabora- 
tion of detail and a large number of figures. The 
task for attention is at times huge. Even a single 
portrait is dealt with in such a way as to suggest 
an infinity of things not actually portrayed. The 



138 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

Rembrandt portrait often seems as if about to 
speak, or at least it sets us to psychologizing as 
to what mental processes were represented on 
the canvas. The Bocklin or Turner landscape, 
instead of leaving us content with direct beauty, 
challenges us to penetrate deep mysteries*. In 
architecture the Greek temple offers the same type 
of contrast with the Gothic cathedral. The per- 
fection of simplicity of the Greek temple allows 
everything to be apprehended with little effort. 
The Gothic cathedral almost baffles us with its 
immense number of pillars and flying buttresses, 
statues, spires and windows. 

Nordic art is a tribute to Nordic capacity for 
effort. It pitches the struggle at a level of inten- 
sity which would discourage a mind not well 
supplied with active tendencies. Not merely com- 
plexity, but even pain itself forms one of the fund- 
amental conditions of aesthetic enjoyment for the 
north European. We find this explicitly recog- 
nized in much of their criticism of art and litera- 
ture. For example, Schiller's dictum on tragedy 
was that " the highest degree of moral pleasure 
cannot make itself felt except in conflict. It 
follows hence that the highest degree of pleasure 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 139 

must always be accompanied by pain." And, 
according to Marshall, 1 it was laid down by 
Schlegel as a principle of modern art that beauty 
and the characteristic ugly be indissolubly con- 
nected; and by Rosenkranz " that the artistic 
genius finds the triumph of his art where he repre- 
sents the ugly objectified, and beauty all-powerful 
through triumph over evil." The same acknowl- 
edgment of difficulty and effort as indispensable 
to aesthetic pleasure is seen in Lessing's insistence 
that the artist's work be incomplete in detail in 
order to leave room for the imagination to work 
out its own salvation. Strict realism so exact in 
every detail as to forbid personal interpretation 
falls short of ideal beauty, because it leaves too 
little occasion for inner activity on the part of the 
spectator. 

It is not by accident then that the artistic 
preeminence of any nation or people runs parallel 
with the power of that nation to achieve. The 
golden age in art has always been the golden age 
in national accomplishment. The age of Pericles 
in Greece, the Renaissance in Italy, the Eliza- 

1 H. R. Marshall, " Pain, Pleasure, and ^Esthetics," London, 
P. 309. 



1 4 o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

bethan period in England, the Nineteenth Century 
in Germany, were all times in which great aspira- 
tions were being realized and the atmosphere was 
charged with the spirit of achievement. By the 
same token great art can hardly appear in a 
decadent age. " Where there is no vision the 
people perish," and one of the surest symptoms of 
approaching demise is the loss of artistic capacity. 
But if difficulty is the handmaiden of aesthetic 
pleasure, it is clear that the degree of difficulty 
must accord with our power for solution. The 
arousal of activities which arrive nowhere can 
result only in an unpleasant jangling. " Beauty/' 
said Schiller^ u can tolerate nothing abrupt or 
violent M ; and Spencer probably had a similar 
principle in mind when he made grace dependent 
on adaptation to ends. Complete aesthetic satis- 
faction comes about when manifold activities have 
reached their appropriate ends. This is very 
aptly illustrated in Marshall's 1 comparison of the 
beauty of the suspension bridge with the ugliness 
of the cantilever. " All of nature's lines," he 
writes, " are affected by the power of gravitation. 
It seems clear to me that the relative grace of the 

1 Marshall, op. cit. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 141 

suspension bridge and of the cantilever is princi- 
pally determined by the fact that the catenary 
curve in the one case presents to us nature's 
pendent form, while the strutted extensions of the 
cantilever bring to us other lines than those in 
accord with which she has educated us. As one's 
eye follows the lines of the truss, natural organic 
combinations bring preparation for action in 
certain directions. But the stimuli to these 
activities fail when the abrupt and rigid lines break 
off in directions whch nature has never given us ; 
the shocks . . . that result produce that sense of 
discomfort which we express by calling the work 

ugly." 

[This same abortion of habitual activities is what 
displeases us when any striking disproportion of 
features renders a face hideously ugly, or when, 
in listening to music which we are prepared to 
follow through familiar progressions, we hear an 
incorrect note or a new variety of dissonance for 
which our musical education has left us ill adapted. 
The impossible sequences of chords which occur 
in the music of Schonberg have proven too much 
for the endurance of present day symphony 
audiences, and his eccentric progressions have been 



1 42 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

greeted with an uproar of derisive laughter, even 
in restrained Boston. A more advanced age may 
become educated to the ability to unify this mani- 
fold of musical complexity, but for the present 
Schonberg offers only a warning example of the 
importance of knowing the limits of the hearer's 
power to combine sounds harmoniously. 

In the enjoyment of rhythm also we are able to 
observe the importance of the adjustment of 
mental activity to the stimulus which it anticipates. 
As Stout observes, " where recurrence is regular, 
we are prepared for it. On the other hand, an 
irregularity which defies mental forecast, is per- 
plexing and painful. When rhythm exists, the 
oncoming of a stimulus is met beforehand by a 
preexcitement in conformity with it." But with 
special training it is quite possible to derive pleas- 
ure from rhythms so complex as to bafHe us 
completely at the first encounter. It is a far cry 
from the simple time which the backwoods fiddler 
beats with his foot, to the involved rhythms and 
changes of tempo which add to the resources of an 
orchestral program. Rhythmic forms become 
amazingly complex in the dances of many savage 
tribes, notably among the American Indians, 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 143 

whose war-dances are sometimes marKed by 
variations altogether too subtle for detection by 
spectators unused to their rhythmic practices. As 
in the case of harmony, it is the mastery of com- 
plexities which affords the most intense pleasure, 
but any irregularity which exceeds our mental 
control is the occasion for violent unpleasantness 
or pain. The unhappiness of dancing with a 
partner continually out of step soon taxes one's 
ability to be even conventionally polite. Here is 
a situation which no preparation can match. 
Expectation is continually amiss, and every effort 
ends only in futility. It is little wonder that the 
average dancer much prefers as partner an insig- 
nificant person who dances well to one of great 
personal charm but with no sense of rhythm. 

One important aspect of the connection of 
aesthetic pleasure with the fact of mental effort is 
to be discovered in the phase of rest after stren- 
uous activity. The peculiar pleasure of listening 
to the resolution of a discord, or of sitting back 
easily for the quiet second movement of a sym- 
phony after fifteen minutes of storm and stress, 
are illustrations which at once come to mind. 
This phase of pleasure has so impressed some 



i 4 4 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

thinkers that they have been inclined to make con- 
trast an all-important factor in aesthetics. Fech- 
ner has gone so far as to make the statement that 
" pleasure experiences bring more pleasure the 
more they come in contrast with experiences, of 
pain or less pleasure." [This would be true if the 
most significant part of activity were the rest after- 
wards, but we have not found this to be the case. 
The struggle itself we have been obliged to regard 
as the central fact. Recuperation is of impor- 
tance chiefly as a preparation for action. Pleas- 
ures of inactivity are therefore in a sense 
incidental pleasures. They register the fulfill- 
ment of a temporary need, but are by no means 
the ultimate fact in the pleasure-pain situation. 
To assert that our greatest pleasures are those 
that follow pain is comparable to asserting that 
the climax of the day's work is the rest which 
comes when work is done. 

Summary 

In our brief review of esthetics we have seen 
that the pleasure derived from this source is a 
special instance of the triumph of mental activity 
in overcoming a particular kind of difficulty. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 145 

Real art demands that we put forth a vigorous 
effort to comprehend a manifold of impressions 
in a single scheme of thought. When this effort 
is severe but successful, asthetic joy is at its very 
pitch; when only a listless effort is called forth, 
the esthetic work is trivial; when the effort 
demanded exceeds our powers of mental activity, 
or when there is violent thwarting of the powers 
called into play, we experience the painful shock 
of ugliness. 



CHAPTER IX 

Pleasure in Play 

It is one of the axioms of our everyday thinking 
that play is a form of pleasure. It is so universal 
in its power to bring delight that we take it as a 
matter of course that the human being of no 
matter what age or race, is enjoying himself when 
at play. The boy throwing himself with abandon 
into a game of ball ; the adult eagerly seeking out 
his clubmates for an hour of billiards ; the old man 
assiduously keeping up his golf — all testify to the 
fact that humanity has one of its most perpetual 
fountains of joy in the spirit of play. 

This fact raises two questions of very great 
interest to one who would understand the ways of 
human nature: Why do we play? Why do we 
enjoy play? 

[The first of these questions has been given a 

variety of answers. Spencer held that we play 

when we have an excess of energy and feel dis- 

146 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 147 

posed to let off steam. The frisky colt was for 
him the typical embodiment of the playful state of 
mind. But he took little account of the fact that 
play may go on to the point of exhaustion. A 
view which has been held especially by President 
G. Stanley Hall is that in play we hark back to 
the earlier existence of the species. In games of 
contest, for example, we are supposed to lapse 
into the past of ages long ago when personal 
encounters were of the tooth-and-nail variety, and 
the savage war of all against all made survival 
depend on an abundance of pugnacity. In an 
article written some years ago, this view is applied 
by Patrick to the psychology of American foot- 
ball. The author maintained that this game has 
developed such a gripping hold on players and 
spectators because of the many opportunities 
which it affords us to retreat through aeons of 
time and live out some of the dormant tendencies 
to which the Twentieth Century civilized life 
affords little exercise. The same view is sug- 
gested with cynical jocoseness in the humorous 
setting of a recent popular magazine, in which two 
girls are represented as looking on at a football 
contest and discussing the effects of the game on 



i 4 8 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

the players. In answer to her companion's query 
as to whether the game will brutalize the partici- 
pants, the second girl replies, " Well, one must 
make men of them somehow." 

Still another view of play which has found 
wide acceptance is that of the German psycholo- 
gist, Karl Groos. He finds that play is most 
typically an activity of childhood, and believes 
that its real significance lies in the preparation 
which it affords for the serious activities that are 
to come with maturity. The small girl enjoying 
her dolls is becoming better fitted for the serious 
tasks of maternity. [The lad who enters into all 
of the activities of his gang is so much the better 
prepared to take up, when an adult, the work of 
social and political organization. 

It is not necessary here to enter into the 
theoretical discussion of these views, each of 
which undoubtedly has in it a partial element of 
truth. The outstanding fact common to them all 
is that in play we give expression to certain definite 
inborn tendencies which demand more exercise 
than the mere routine of life affords them. 
These inborn tendencies, or instincts, are many in 
number, and of varying degrees of insistency. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 149 

Fear, anger, self-assertion, parental tenderness, 
sexual love, acquisitiveness and sociability are 
among the more powerful of the instinctive 
tendencies which drive us spontaneously to activi- 
ties of the most vigorous character, when the 
circumstances are appropriate. Reason is thrown 
to the winds when a human being is thoroughly 
frightened or angered, when a parent is gravely 
concerned about his child, a lover about the object 
of his concern, a miser about his gold. The 
instincts at work are too impelling to admit of any 
hindrance or thwarting. 

In play various instincts are in operation, but 
always in a peculiarly modified way; and this 
brings us to the answer to our second question. 
All instincts seem to afford pleasure in their play- 
ful manifestation, even those which are unpleasant 
at full intensity. The fear which is horrible 
becomes the thrill which is delightful. The anger 
which seeks utterly to destroy opposition becomes 
the social rivalry or the frolicking physical con- 
test in which any serious injury to one's opponent 
is studiously avoided. If special illustrations 
were needed to make clear this difference, no more 
obvious example could be found than in the 



i 5 o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

behavior of dogs. 1 When two dogs fight, they 
are savagely intent on tearing and rending each 
other; when they play, they go through all of the 
outward form of combat, and yet the teeth which 
are pressed against the throat never inflict a 
wound. What is true of fear and anger obtains 
for all of the instincts when playfully manifested. 
[The original instinct is reduced in intensity in such 
a fashion that it can be elaborated and prolonged 
without making any excessive demands on the or- 
ganism. The sex instinct becomes connected with 
the elaborate joys of courtship and association; 
the gross impulse of hunger is refined to the more 
exquisite pleasure of the social meal partaken 
with many accessories and with the observance of 
polite custom ; the instinct for acquisition becomes 
side-tracked into the mild enjoyment that is af- 
forded by collecting the objects of one's hobbies; 
and serious curiosity is reduced to the idle interest 
in gossip and small talk. Even the instincts 
which are naturally connected with extremely dis- 
agreeable states of mind may undergo such special 
modification in play as to afford a certain thrill. 
The repulsion which normally causes us to shrink 

1 See W. McDougall, " Social Psychology." 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 151 

with disgust may be mildly called forth with a 
not unfavorable effect. Games are not uncom- 
mon in which the chief attraction is touching with 
closed eyes horribly repulsive objects. Despite 
the creepy shudder with which the players of such 
games react to the unseen contacts, they continue 
to play as though fascinated by this very repulsive- 

ness. 

Summary 

Without exception the peculiar pleasure of play 
seems to be connected with the fact that playful 
activity is a reduction and elaboration of grosser 
and more severe instinctive activity. The often 
excessive violence of fear, anger } repulsion, etc., 
is modified to the more controlled and always 
pleasant experiences of rivalry and adventure. 
The naturally agreeable emotions of parental ten- 
derness, self-assertion, acquisition, etc., are re- 
placed by the less pleasant but agreeably interest- 
ing make-believe states for which these instincts 
furnish the background. 



CHAPTER X 

The Paradox of Pleasure Seeking 

Ever since the memory of man there has always 
been a certain respectably large number of people 
who persuaded themselves that pleasure is some- 
thing which ought to be sought. At times this 
hedonism, as it is called, has taken on a very gross 
and objectionable form, as when represented in 
phrases such as, 

" Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we 
die." At other times it has given itself a fairly 
respectable ethics by arguing that since virtue is 
identical with happiness the way to attain virtue 
is to seek happiness. But under some guise or 
other there has always been a widely current doc- 
trine which made for the direct pursuit of pleas- 
urable states of mind. One of the curious puz- 
zles which has tried the wits of these people 
has been the paradoxical fact that the surest way 
to lose pleasure has been by directly seeking it 

152 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 153 

Many a bachelor of independent means, after try- 
ing the luxury of first one fashionable resort and 
then another, has asked himself despondently why 
he seemed to derive so much less pleasure out of 
life than some hard-working clerk of his acquaint- 
ance, who must needs begin work at 8 o'clock 
sharp every day in the week, and whose slender 
financial resources permitted only very occasional 
and carefully planned vacations. He has had fre- 
quent reason to wonder why his immunity from 
work has brought him nothing but the melancholy 
of fatty degeneration, and he has unhappily 
shifted from one diversion to another only to find 
each turn to dust and ashes in his very pursuit 
of it. Worst of all he has found his capacity for 
pain and irritation enormously over-developed. 
His condition has become like that of the ancient 
sybarite who was uncomfortable even on his bed 
of rose leaves because one of them crumpled and 
hurt him ! When such a person gives due reflec- 
tion to his mental condition he is forced to con- 
clude that even though pleasure be conceived of 
as the great end of life, it is certainly not an end 
which can be directly aimed at, and attained. It 
can only come as the by-product of aims of an 



i 5 4 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

altogether different sort. It is something that can 
be added to his life as the result of correct living, 
but not something which can be achieved in its 
own right, then used as a guarantee that life is 
proceeding along the proper lines. The Epi- 
cureans put the cart before the horse; whatever 
the exaggerations of the Stoics, their method 
of procedure was psychologically sound. To 
make practical virtue the aim, to give one's self 
directly and with hardihood to the struggle for 
which he is by nature equipped, this is the only 
guarantee that insures our capacity for pleasure. 

Who can imagine that any athletic team on the 
eve of a big contest would be willing to forego 
the excitement of the actual game by having them- 
selves victors through forfeit? Not the desire 
for victory itself but the desire to win victory is 
the driving force back of their enthusiasm. The 
game is the thing in their mind, and their ambition 
to excel in competition would only be cruelly 
cheated if the need for competition were removed. 

The fact that life is unthinkable except as a 
struggle, means, as we have seen in an earlier 
chapter, that access to pleasure is only to be had 
either through the activity of struggle itself, or in 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 155 

a rest which prepares for further struggle. A 
life full of conflict must necessarily abound in both 
of these phases of pleasure, whereas a life from 
which the chief occasions for conflict have been 
removed must suffer a corresponding reduction in 
opportunity for pleasure, and the man thus de- 
prived of rugged exercise soon comes to find even 
normal conflicts excessive and therefore painful. 
The practical question as to what type of life 
offers the most pleasure is one which admits of 
but one answer. It is the life in which conflict 
is deliberately chosen and efficiently prepared for. 
History offers an abundance of cases to prove that 
the above statement is true without exception. 
One is forced to think of stupendous workers like 
Charlemagne, Cromwell or Calvin as men far bet- 
ter acquainted with pleasure than their less en- 
ergetic contemporaries. By contrast with these 
men one naturally turns to the decadent Roman 
emperors, men who, removed by their absolute 
world-dominion from even the responsibility of 
more worlds to conquer, gave themselves stu- 
diously to the joy of wielding the power which it 
required no effort of theirs to maintain. The 
historian Hodgkin, writing of Tiberius, Caligula, 



i s6 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

Claudius and Nero, says that " standing as it 
were on the Mount of Temptation, and seeing all 
the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of 
them stretched at an immeasurable distance below 
their feet, they were seized with a dizziness of 
soul." We read that Tiberius in the later years 
of his reign built several villas on an island in the 
Bay of Naples, and having gathered about him a 
band of congenial companions, passed his time in 
scandalous profligacy. The penalty for softened 
moral fiber in all of these men seems to have been 
a jaded incapacity for normal enjoyment. One 
artificial extravagance after another was devised 
to whip up their dulled sensibilities. " Claudius 
determined to give an entertainment that should 
render insignificant all similar efforts. Upon a 
large lake, whose sloping banks afforded seats for 
the vast multitude of spectators, he exhibited a 
naval battle, in which two opposing fleets, bearing 
nineteen thousand gladiators, fought as though in 
real battle, till the water was reddened with blood 
and littered with the wreckage of the broken 
ships." * Nero's joy at the burning of Rome, 
which he himself is supposed to have instigated, 

1 Myers: "Rome: Its Rise and Fall," p. 343. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 157 

is another instance showing how sadly the mind is 
soon put to. it when cut off from the normal con- 
ditions of life and left to create wantonly its own 
pleasurable situations. No normal person could 
help shuddering at the thought of entering into 
the state of mind of any of these emperors whose 
names have been so unfavorably impressed on the 
memory of the race. By comparison almost any 
extreme of asceticism would afford relief. And 
by contrast the lives of any of the world's famous 
men of iron, who have wrought serious purposes 
in spite of tremendous difficulty, seem to have 
been states of unmixed blessedness. 

It appears then that even the frank pursuit of 
pleasure will fail of its ends unless the program 
followed gives expression to the sturdy and ro- 
bust tendencies which every man possesses to a 
greater or less degree. The practical advice 
which James * offers, in his remarkably suggestive 
chapter on habit, may be quoted as entirely ap- 
propriate to the needs of any one interested in 
getting the most fundamental joys out of life. 
The passage reads, " Keep the faculty of effort 
alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every 

1 James, op. cit., p. 149. 



158 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic 
in little unnecessary points, do every day or two 
something for no other reason than that you 
would rather not do it. . . . The man who has 
daily inured himself to habits of concentrated 
attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in un- 
necessary things . . . will stand like a tower 
when everything rocks around him, and when his 
softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in 
the blast." * But more than this, he will daily 
experience a greater quantity of pleasure than his 
softer fellow-mortals are capable of. Both in 
his activity and in his rest he comes nearer to the 
optimal conditions of his nature. 

We have spoken so far of the general fact that 
man is a bundle of activity tendencies, and that his 
pleasure comes most naturally in the successful 
expression of these tendencies. It remains to 
point out how the existence of special aptitudes in 
different individuals forces expression along par- 
ticular lines, if the talented person is to lead his 
life happily. Mozart's astounding ability to note 
from memory the Miserere of the Sistine Chapel 

1 James, "Psychology," p. 149. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 159 

forced him to seek music in order to find happi- 
ness. A world without music could by no pos- 
sibility ever have been satisfying to his soul. 
Macaulay's prodigious visual memory, which en- 
abled him to repeat literally page after page, must 
have forced him to find his real delight in a life 
of letters. The great captains of industry to-day 
are, as a rule, men in whom certain instinctive stir- 
rings are constantly at work, impelling them to 
master the commercial environment which so 
readily inflames their imaginations. The inven- 
tor, even more than the money maker, is a man 
whose instinctive equipment drives him to find 
the same satisfaction in his contrivance that the 
beaver finds with his dam, or the bird with its 
nest. One of the chief reasons why the inventor 
is so impractical seems to be that he is so fas- 
cinated with the mere working out of the impulse 
to create that he is incapacitated for any method- 
ical and systematic fashioning of his ideas. Bub- 
bling over as he is with projects, his most intense 
pleasure is in the creation of the project rather 
than in its utilization. Almost every great in- 
ventor has spent much of his time and energy on 



i6o PAIN AND PLEASURE 

oddities, many of them with little possible use. 1 
" Watt was interested in a quantity of inventions 
and devices. Among them may be mentioned a 
new kind of clock which, to quote Watt's own 
language, i is to be ranked in mechanics as riddles 
and rebuses are ranked in poetry ' ; a micrometer ; 
a drawing machine, which he himself termed ' a 
gimcrack ' ; a copying machine for letters, proto- 
type of the copying devices so long in use ; a ma- 
chine for drying linen and muslin by steam." 
Watt's fertility for " gimcracks " seems to have 
been equaled by that of Ericsson. In a quota- 
tion from Church's " Life of Ericsson " cited by 
Taussig, we read the following: " When he 
[Ericsson] took possession of his new quarters 
[the house on Beach Street, which he bought in 
1864] he found his company disputed by a nu- 
merous horde of rats, who considered themselves 
tenants at will, and stubbornly refused to yield 
possession. . . . Regarding the situation as a 
problem to. be solved by mechanical means, with 
his own hands he drew the plans for a vast and 
mighty trap. Xo the leading idea [of a water- 

1 F. W. Taussig, "Inventors and Money-makers," New York, 
19 1 5, p. 27ff. 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 161 

tank beneath a trap door] he laid no claim, but 
the details were wholly new, and upon an un- 
heard-of scale. Tracings were made by an as- 
sistant draughtsman, and went the rounds of the 
shop; the pattern-maker, the brass-founder, the 
finisher, the carpenter, the tinsmith, each had a 
share in this novel work. At last it was com- 
pleted and erected; it filled up half the basement, 
and was baited with half a cheese. . , . But he 
had underestimated the cunning of the rodents; 
as a place for keeping cheese in safety, the pon- 
derous engine answered admirably, but it did not 
frighten away the obnoxious animals; and he was 
forced to admit that ' these little beasts have 
brains altogether too big for their heads.' " 

From the foregoing examples it is clear that 
special aptitudes clamor for the opportunity of 
asserting themselves. The tasks which are their 
fit occasion of self-expression are the supreme joy 
of the man of genius, who will suffer every earthly 
privation rather than brook the thwarting of his 
talents. The conflict with the environment takes 
on a very special character in these men, but we 
see in their particular demands for self-realiza- 
tion merely a unique instance of the same principle 



i62 PAIN AND PLEASURE 

which applies to the rest of humanity. No mind 
ever appears on the scene of life in a state of 
emptiness, devoid of specific traits. All of us, no 
matter how mediocre, bring into the world a host 
of very definite tendencies, some of which we share 
in common with the whole race, others of which 
mark us for individualistic tastes, capacities and 
interests. The importance of these tendencies is 
that they compel us to give battle to the environ- 
ment along certain definite lines, and incidentally 
afford us pleasure whenever the struggle is on. 
But far from urging us to pursue pleasure itself 
they direct us to the conquest of objects about us. 
They supply us with dominating interests, which in 
turn are our chief source of pleasure; but it would 
be a reversal of the psychological facts to say that 
pleasure is the normal incentive. It is the will 
to do, to attain, which lies immediately behind 
man's restless striving. Pleasure is not the con- 
dition of the struggle, but merely crowns strife 
when successful. 

Summary 

Pleasure is not obtainable by direct pursuit. It 
comes as the by-product of conflicts which engage 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 163 

to the full the activity-tendencies that we bring 
with us into the world. The more the struggle is 
equal to our powers of conquest the greater will 
be the occasion of pleasure. This is particularly 
true of special talents which demand a special en- 
vironment for their adequate exercise. The 
musician is happy when pitting himself against the 
world of sound; the captain of industry in seeking 
commerce finds pleasure; likewise the inventor, in 
order to arrive at pleasure must have free play to 
make mechanical conquests. Everywhere we find 
the same psychological law. Pleasure can not be 
consistently pursued of itself. It appears only 
as an incidental feature of self-expression. 






CHAPTER XI 

Conclusion 

We have seen that pain and pleasure sensations 
probably have their roots in an obscure state of 
feeling of like and dislike that is shared in some 
measure by the whole animal world, although it 
is doubtful at what point in the evolutionary 
series this feeling becomes sufficiently clear to be 
properly described by the term sensation. 
Whether as sensation or as feeling, the broad 
significance of pain and pleasure is to be found 
in the fact that life is essentially a struggle, in 
which pleasure is the accompaniment of some form 
of mental or physical success, and pain is an in- 
dication of defeat or of abortive effort. Differ- 
ent individuals enter the struggle variously 
equipped, and, according to their strength and 
particular kind of equipment, find it natural to 
pitch the contest at varying degrees of intensity 
and at points in the environment particularly vul- 
nerable to their mode of attack. 

164 



PAIN AND PLEASURE 165 

Pleasure is not to be had by direct quest or 
by avoiding encounter, but only by making the 
venture and bringing it to a successful issue. At- 
rophy of original powers and a constantly increas- 
ing capacity for pain are the inevitable outcome of 
a purely defensive attitude toward life. To the 
man who would live happily there is but one 
course that is psychologically sound. Let him 
seek conflict and prepare to wage the struggle 
efficiently. In particular let him study to know 
his own individual aptitudes, and seek his clash 
with the environment at points where these can be 
brought strenuously into play. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alechsieff, N. Die Grundformen der Gefiihle. Psy- 

cholog., Studien, 1907, 156-271. 
Alrutz, S. Die Kitzel und Juckempfindungen. Skand., 

Arch. f. Physiol., 1908, XX, 371. 
Ueber Schmerz und Schmerznerven, Eine kritische 

Historik. Arch. f. Physiol., 1905, 1-46. 
— — Untersuchungen ueber Schmerzpunkte und doppelte 

Schmerzempfindungen. Arch. f. Physiol., 1905, 

414-430. 
Angell, J. R., and Thompson, H. B. A Study of the 

Relations between Certain Organic Processes and 

Consciousness. Psych. Rev., 1899, VI. 
Babler, E. R. The Significance of Sudden Severe Ab- 
dominal Pain. New York Med. Jour., Aug. 5, 

1905, 276-320. 
Baldwin, J. M. Mental Development in the Child and 

the Race. 1906, 457 ff. 
Basler, A. Experimented Untersuchungen ueber den 

Hautkitzel. Arch. f. d. ges. Physiol. (Pflueger), 

1912, 375-392. 
Behan, R. J. Pain : Its Origin, Conduction, Perception 

and Diagnostic Significance. New York, 19 16. 
Benn, A. W. Aristotle's Theory of Tragic Emotion. 

Mind, N. S., 1914, 84-90. 
Bernstein, A. H. Reflex Pains. Internat. Jour. Sur- 
gery, New York, 1906, 252. 
Bloodgood, J. C. Abdominal Pain. Internat. Clin., 

1907, 277. 

167 



1 681 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Borgquist, A. Crying. Am. Jour, of Psychol., 1906, 
149-206. 

Bos, C. Du plaisir de la douleur. Rev. Phil., Paris, 
1902, 60-74. 

Bowlby, A. Pain: Its Importance in Diagnosis' and Its 
Tendency to Mislead. Clin. Jour., London, 1903, 
289-296. 

Cain, J. S. Pain as a Diagnostic Factor. Nashville 
Jour. Med. and Surg., June, 1903, 243-250. 

Campbell, J. A. E. Pain and Its Significance in Diag- 
nosis. Montreal Med. Jour., 1902, 471-478. 

Cannon, W. B. Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear 
and Rage. New York, 19 15. 

and Washburn, A. L. "An Explanation of Hun- 
ger. Amer. Jour, of Physiol., 19 12, 441 --45 4. 

Coriat, I. H. Pulse Reactions as a Measure of Emotion. 
Jour, of Abnorm. Psychol., 1909, 261-279. 

Crile, G. W. The Origin and Nature of the Emotions. 
19 1 5, Philadelphia. 

Dallemagne, J. La Peine corporelle et ses Bases physi- 
ologiques. 1893. 

Dana, C. L. The Interpretation of Pain and the 
Dyesthesias. Jour. Am. Med. Assoc, LVI, No. 

11,787. 
Dearborn, G. V. N. The Emotion of Joy. Mon. Sup. 

No. 9, Psychol. Rev., 1899. 
Certain Further Facts in the Physiology of Euphoria. 

Psychol. Rev., 1914, 166-188. 
Some Practical Notes on Blood-Pressure. Med. 

Rec., Sept., 19 16. 
The Nature of the Smile and the Laugh. Science, 

1900, 851-855. 



-The Influence of Joy. Boston, 19 16. 



Darwin, C. The Expression of the Emotions. 1872. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 

Dewey, J, The Theory of Emotion. Psych. Rev., 1895. 
Donovan, J. Why Do Animals Cry in Pain ? Lancet, 

Jan., 1906. 
Fere, C. Travail et Plaisir. Paris, 1904. 
— — Douleur et Fatigue. Compt. rend. soc. de biol., 1 905, 

12-15. 
Fite, W. The Place of Pleasure and Pain in Functional 

Psychology. Psych. Rev., 1903, 633-644. 
Frey, M. von. Beitr. zur Sinnesphysiol. d. Haut. Ber. 

d. sachs. Gesell. d. Wiss., 1894, x 895, 1897. 

Vorlesungen ueber Physiologic 1904, 308 ff. 

Gard, W. L. Some Neurological and Psychological 

Aspects of Shock. Ped. Sem., 1909, 439-473. 
Gasser, H. The Physiology of Pain. Med. Times, 

1903, XXXI. 
Pleasure and Pain Consciousness. Tr. Med. Soc, 

Madison, Wisconsin, 1897, 562-577. 
Gilman. Syllabus of Lectures on the Psychology of 

Pain and Pleasure. Am. Jour, of Psychol., VI, I, 

3-6o. 
Goldscheider, A. Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Leip- 
zig, 1898. 
Hall, G. S., and Allin, A. The Psychology of Tickling 

and Laughter. Am. Jour, of Psychol., 1898, 

1-33. 

Head, H., Rivers, W. H. R., and Sherren, J. The 
Afferent Nervous System from a New Aspect. 
Brain, 1905, XXVIII, 99- 

Head, H., and Rivers, W. H. R. A Human Experi- 
ment in Nerve Division. Brain, 1908, XXXI, 

323. 
Head, H., and Thompson, T. On the Grouping of 
/ Afferent Impulses within the Spinal Cord. Brain, 
1906, XXIX, 537-743. 



170 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Herrick, C. J. Introduction to Neurology. 1916, 
Chapter on Pleasure and Pain. 

Hertz, A. F. The Sensibility of the Alimentary Canal 
in Health and Disease. Lancet, 191 1. 

Holmes, S. J. The Evolution of Animal Intelligence. 
New York, 191 1. 

Howell, C. M. Pain: General Consideration. Physi- 
ology, 1909, 281. 

Humphries, F. H. What Is Pain? An Attempt to 
Define Its Origin and Nature. Am. Phys., New 
York, 1908, 66-75. 

Ioteyko, I., and Stefanowska, M. Psycho-physiologie 
de la douleur. Paris, 1909. 

James, W. Principles of Psychology. New York, 1894. 

Kelchner, M. Die Abhangigkeit der Atem-und Puls- 
veranderung vom Reiz und vom Gefuhl. Arch. 
f. d. ges. Psychol., 1905. 

— — Sammelreferat ueber den gegenwartigen Stand der 
Erorterung einiger Grundprobleme der Gefuhlspsy- 
chologie. Arch. f. d. ges. Psychol., 1910, 97-164. 

Lagerborg, R. Das Gefuhlsproblem. Leipzig, 1905. 

Lange, C. Die Gemiitsbewegungen. Wurzburg, 19 10. 

Mantegazza, P. Physiologie du Plaisir. 1886. 

Physiologie de la Douleur. 1888. 

Marshall, H. R. Pain, Pleasure and Esthetics. Lon- 
don, 1894. 

Meyer, M. The Nervous Correlate of Pleasantness and 
Unpleasantness. Psych. Rev., 1908, two articles. 

Michaelis, A. Der Schmerz. Leipzig, 1905. 

Muensterberg, H. Lust and Unlust. Beitrage zur 
experimentellen Psychologie, No. 4. 

Murray, E. A Qualitative Analysis of Tickling. Am. 
Jour. Psych., 1908, 289. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY i 7 i 

Nichols, H. Origin of Pleasure and Pain. Philos. 

Rev., 1892, Nos. 4 and 5. 
Pfordten, O. von der. Empfindung und Gefiihl. 

Zeitsch. f. Psychol., 19 12, 61-95. 
Rehwoldt, F. Ueber respiratorische Affektsymptome. 

Psych. Studien, 191 1, 141-195. 
Ribot, Th. Problemes de psychologie affective. Paris, 

1910. 
Pathological Pleasures and Pains. Monist, 1895, 

176ft 
Roux, J. La Sensation douloureuse. 1896. 
Schmidt, R. Pain: Its Diagnostic Significance. Amer. 

trans., Philadelphia, 1908. 
Shepard, J. F. Organic Changes and Feeling. Amer. 

Jour, of Psych., 1906, 522-584. 
Sherrington, C. S. Cutaneous Sensations, in Schaefer's 

Text-book of Physiology. London, 1900. 
The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. 

New York, 1906. 
Sternberg, W. Kitzel und Juckempfindung. Zsch. f. 

Sinnesphysiol., 1910, 51-56. 

Die Kitzelgefuhle. Zentralbl. f. Physiol., 19 10, 865. 

Die Physiologie der Kitzelgefuhle. Zsch, f. Psychol., 

i9"i 73-109. 
Storring, G. Experimented Beitrage zur Lehre vom 

Gefuhle. Archiv. f. d. ges. Psyschol., 1905, 316- 

356. 
Stout, G. F. Analytic Psychology. London, 1896, 

Chapter on Pleasure and Pain. 
Stumpf, C. Ueber Gefuhlsempfindungen. Zsch. f. 

Psychol., 1906, I. 
Strong, C. D. Physical Pain and Pain Nerves. Psych. 

Rev., 1896, 64 ft 






172 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Strong, C. D. The Psychology of Pain. Psych. Rev., 

1895, II, 329-377. 
Sully., J. Essay on Laughter. London, 1907. 

Swift, E. J. Sensibility to Pain. Amer. Jour. Physiol., 

1900, XI, 312-317. 
Thole. Ueber Jucken und Kitzeln in Beziehung zu 

Schmerzgefuhl und Tastempfindung. Neurol. 

Centblatt, 1912, 610-617. 
Titchener, E. B. Lectures on the Elementary Psy- 
chology of Feeling and Attention. New York, 

1908. 
Thunberg, T. Physiologie d. Druck, Temperatur und 

Schmerzempfindungen, in NagePs Handbuch der 

Physiologie. 1905, III, 647. 
Torok, L. Ueber das Wesen der Juckempfindung. 

Zsch. f. Psychol., 1907, 23 if. 
Upham, H. L. Pleasure and Pain. Boston, 1891. 
Washburn, M. F. The Animal Mind. New York, 

1913. 

Weld, H. P. An Experimental Study of Musical Enjoy- 
ment. Am. Jour, of Psych., 1912, 245-308. 

Witmer, L. Pain. Twentieth Century Practice, 1897, 

903-945. 
Wundt, W. Outlines of Psychology. 1907. 



INDEX 



Adrenalin, 91-93 
^Esthetics, 63-64, 134-145 
Amoeba, 35-38 
Anger, 17, 149-150 

Blood pressure, 89-90, 120 
Bodily distress, see Distress 

Cerebellum, 101-102 
Cerebrum, 46, 100-101 
Circulation, 8, 89-94 
Coagulation, 92 



Imaginary pain, 118-119 
Instincts, 148-149 
Inventors, 159-161 
Itch, 58 

Jellyfish, 40-41 

Laughter, 55, 66 

Marshall's theory, 105-106 
Medulla, 101-102 
Memory, of pain, 57, 66 

of pleasure, 57, 66 
Meyer's theory, 107-108 
Music, 63-64, 136 

see also ^Esthetics 



Diagnostic value of pain, 117- 

133 

Digestion, 80-88 

Discord, 143 

Distress, Bodily, 4, 42-44, 7°- Nervous system, central, 98 
«3 sympathetic, 44, 109-110 

quality of, 7 Neurasthenia, 88, 119-120 

reaction to, 8 Nordic art, 136-139 



Earthworm, 34, 42-44 
Epicureans, 154 
Epidermis, no 



Olfactory lobe, 99 

Optic nerve, 96 

Optic thalamus, see Thalamus 



Fear, as cause of pleasure, 56, Pain spots, 111-112 

149-150 Pain, Biological basis of, 58-59 

Feeling, 10 bodily effects of, 76-95 

Freud, 28 conflict theory, 58-62 

development of, 32-52 
Gratification, 22-28, 70-73 diagnostic value of, 1 17-13 3 

duration, 3 
Hunger, 7, 71 imaginary, 118-119 

173 



174 



INDEX 



Marshall's theory, 105-106 
Meyer's theory, 107-108 
nervous basis of, 96-116 
relation to pleasure, 53-75 
varieties of, see Surface 
pain, Distress, Unpleasant- 
ness 

Paramoecium, 88-89 

Peristalsis, 84-86 

Play, 146-151 

Pleasantness, 28-31, 35-39 
Quality, 29, Stimuli, 30, Re- 
action to, 30-31 

Pleasure, 16 

biological basis of, 58-59 
bodily effects, 76-95 
conflict theory, 58-62 
development, 32-52 
Marshall's theory, 105-106 
Meyer's theory, 107-108 
nervous basis of, 96-116 
relation to pain, 53-75 
varieties of, 31-32 
. see also Tickling, Gratifi- 
cation, Pleasantness 

Pleasure-seeking, 152-163 

Psychasthenia, 1 19-120 

Psycho-physical parallelism, 
96-99 



Referred pain, 121-123 
Rhythm, 142-143 
Ruffini, corpuscles of, 97 

Salivary secretion, 82 

Satiety, 23 

Sex impulse, 27-28, 40, 150 

Spinal cord, 113-114 

Starfish, 41 

Stoics, 154 

Stomach, 5, 71, 82-86 

Surface pain, 46-47, 73-74 

Quality of, 2 

Reaction to, 3 
Sympathetic nervous system, 
44, 109 

Thalamus, 99-104 

Thirst, 24, 25 

Tickling, 16-22, 47-50, 73-74 

Stimuli, 16-17 

Vulnerability, 19 

Quality, 20 

Reaction to, 21 

Unpleasantness, 9, 35-39 
quality,, 9 
reaction to, 12 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



